by Fritz Leiber
The phone tingled his wrist. He lunged at it.
“Dave Cruxon,” he identified himself hoarsely.
“Serenity Shoals, Reception. I find we do have a patient named Gabrielle Wisant. She was admitted this morning. She cannot come to the phone at present or receive visitors. I would suggest, Mr. Cruxon, that you call again in about a week or that you get in touch with—”
Dave put back the phone. His gaze went back to the walls. After a while it became fixed on one particular mask on the far wall. After another while he walked slowly over to it and reached it down. As his fingers touched it, he smiled and his shoulders relaxed, as if it reassured him.
It was the face of a devil—a green devil.
He flipped a little smooth lever that could be operated by the tongue of the wearer and the eyes glowed brilliant red. Set unobtrusively in the cheeks just below the glowing eyes were the actual eyeholes of the mask—small, but each equipped with a fisheye lens so that the wearer would get a wide view.
He laid down the mask reluctantly and from a heap of costumes picked up what looked like a rather narrow silver breastplate or corselet, stiffly metallic but hinged at one side for the convenience of the person putting it on. To it were attached strong wide straps, rather like those of a parachute. A thin cable led from it to a small button-studded metal cylinder that fit in the hand. He smiled again and touched one of the buttons and the hinged breastplate rose toward the ceiling, dangling its straps and dragging upward his other hand and arm. He took his finger off the button and the breastplate sagged toward the floor. He set the whole assembly beside the mask.
Next he took up a wicked-looking pair of rather stiff gloves with horny claws set at the finger-ends. He also handled and set aside a loose one-piece suit.
What distinguished both the gloves and the coverall was that they glowed whitely even in the moderately bright light of the Monsterarium.
Finally he picked up from the piled costumes what looked at first like a large handful of nothing—or rather as if he had picked up a loose cluster of lenses and prisms made of so clear a material as to be almost invisible. In whatever direction he held it, the wall behind was distorted as if seen through a heat-shimmer or as reflected in a crazy-house mirror. Sometimes his hand holding it disappeared partly and when he thrust his other arm into it, that arm vanished.
Actually what he was holding was a robe made of a plastic textile called light-flow fabric. Rather like lucite, the individual threads of the light-flow fabric carried or “piped” the light entering them, but unlike lucite they spilled such light after carrying it roughly halfway around a circular course. The result was that anything draped in light-flow fabric became roughly invisible, especially against a uniform background.
Dave laid down the light-flow fabric rather more reluctantly than he had put down the mask, breastplate and other items. It was as if he had laid down a twisting shadow.
Then Dave clasped his hands behind him and began to pace. From time to time his features worked unpleasantly. The tempo of his pacing quickened. A smile came to his lips, worked into his cheeks, became a fixed, hard, graveyard grin.
Suddenly he stopped by the pile of costumes, struck an attitude, commanded hoarsely, “My hauberk, knave!” and picked up the silver breastplate and belted it around him. He tightened the straps around his thighs and shoulders, his movements now sure and swift.
Next, still grinning, he growled, “My surcoat, sirrah!”—and donned the glowing coverall.
“Vizard!” “Gauntlets!” He put on the green mask and the clawed gloves.
Then he took up the robe of light-flow fabric and started for the door, but he saw the scattered pink notes.
He brushed them off the black blotter, found a white stylus, and gripping it with two fingers and thumb extended from slits in the righthand gauntlet, he wrote:
Dear Bobbie, Dr. Gee, et al,
By the time you read this, you will probably be hearing about me on the news channels. I’m doing one last bang-up public relations job for dear old IU. You can call it Cruxon’s Crusade-the One-Man Witchcraft. I’ve tried out the equipment before, but only experimentally. Not this time! This time when I’m finished, no one will be able to bury the Monster Program. Wish me luck on my Big Hexperiment—you’ll need it!—because the stench is going to be unendurable.
Your little apprentice demon, D.C.
He threw the stylus away over his shoulder and slipped on the robe of light-flow fabric, looping part of it over his head like a cowl.
Some twenty minutes ago a depressed young man in business jerkin and shorts had entered the Monsterarium.
Now an exultant-hearted heat-shimmer, with a reserve glow under its robe of invisibility, exited from it.
There is a batable ground between madness and sanity, though few tread it: laughter.
—the notebooks of A.S.
Andreas Snowden sat in Joel Wisant’s bedroom trying to analyze his feelings of annoyance and uneasiness and dissatisfaction with himself—and also trying to decide if his duty lay here or back at Serenity Shoals.
The windoor was half open on fast-fading sunlight. Through it came a medley of hushed calls and commands, hurried footsteps, twittering female laughter, and the sounds of an amateur orchestra self-consciously tuning up—the Twilight Tranquility Festival was about to begin.
Joel Wisant sat on the edge of the bed looking toward the wall. He was dressed in green tights, jerkin, and peaked cap—a Robin Hood costume for the Festival. His face wore a grimly intent, distant expression. Snowden decided that here was a part of his reason for feeling annoyed—it is always irritating to be in the same room with someone who is communicating silently by micromike and softspeaker. He knew that Wisant was at the moment in touch with Security—not with Securitor Harker, who was downstairs and probably likewise engaged in silent phoning, but with the Central Security Station in New Angeles—but that was all he did know.
Wisant’s face relaxed somewhat, though it stayed grim, and he turned quickly toward Snowden, who seized the opportunity to say, “Joel, when I came here this afternoon, I didn’t know anything about—” but Wisant cut him short with:
“Hold it, Andy!—and listen to this. There have been at least a dozen new mass-hysteria outbreaks in the NLA area in the past two hours.” He rapped it out tersely. “Traffic is snarled on two ground routes and swirled in three ’copter lanes. If safety devices hadn’t worked perfectly there’d have been a hatful of deaths and serious injuries. There’ve been panics in department stores, restaurants, offices, and at least one church. The hallucinations are developing a certain amount of pattern, indicating case-to-case infection. People report something rushing invisibly through the air and buzzing them like a giant fly. I’m having the obvious lunatics held—those reporting hallucinations like green faces or devilish laughter. We can funnel ’em later to psychopathic or your place—I’ll want your advice on that. The thing that bothers me most is that a garbled account of the disturbances has leaked out to the press. ‘Green Demon Jolts City,’ one imbecile blatted! I’ve given orders to have the involved ’casters and commentators picked up—got to try to limit the infection. Can you suggest any other measures I should take?”
“Why, no, Joel—it’s rather out of my sphere, you know,” Snowden hedged. “And I’m not too sure about your theory of infectious psychosis, though I’ve run across a little folie a deux in my time. But what I did want to talk to you about—”
“Out of your sphere, Andy? What do you mean by that?” Wisant interrupted curtly. “You’re a psychologist, psychiatrist—mass hysteria’s right up your alley.”
“Perhaps, but security operations aren’t. And how can you be so sure, Joel, that there isn’t something real behind these scares?”
“Green faces, invisible fliers, Satanic laughter?—don’t be ridiculous, Andy. Why these are just the sort of outbreaks Report K predicts. They’re like the two cases here last night. Wake up, man!—this is a major emergency.”
“Well…perhaps it is. It still isn’t up my alley. Get your loonies to Serenity Shoals and I’ll handle them.” Snowden raised his hand defensively. “Now wait a minute, Joel, there’s something I want to say. I’ve had it on my mind ever since I heard about Gabby. I was shocked to hear about that, Joel—you should have told me about it earlier. Anyway, you had a big shock, this morning. No, don’t tell me differently—it’s bound to shake a man to his roots when his daughter aberrates and does a symbolic murder on him or beside him. You simply shouldn’t be driving yourself the way you are. You ought to have postponed the IU hearing this morning. It could have waited.”
“What?—and have taken a chance of more of that Monster material getting to the public?”
Snowden shrugged. “A day or two one way or the other could hardly have made any difference.”
“I disagree,” Wisant said sharply. “Even as it is, it’s touched off this mass hysteria and—”
“—if it is mass hysteria—”
Wisant shook his head impatiently. “—and we had to show Cruxon up as an irresponsible mischief maker. You must admit that was a good thing.”
“I suppose so,” Snowden said slowly. “Though I’m rather sorry we stamped on him quite so hard—teased him into stamping on himself, really. He had hold of some very interesting ideas even if he was making bad use of them.”
“How can you say that, Andy? Don’t you psychologists ever take things seriously?” Wisant sounded deeply shocked. His face worked a little. “Look, Andy, I haven’t told anybody this, but I think Cruxon was largely responsible for what happened to Gabby.”
Snowden looked up sharply. “I keep forgetting you said they were acquainted. Joel, how deep did that go? Did they have dates? Do you think they were in love? Were they together much?”
“I don’t know!” Wisant had started to pace. “Gabby didn’t have dates. She wasn’t old enough to be in love. She met Cruxon when he lectured to her communications class. After that she saw him in the daytime—only once or twice, I thought—to get material for her course. But there must have been things Gabby didn’t tell me. I don’t know how far they went, Andy, I don’t know!”
He broke off because a plump woman in flowing Greek robes of green silk had darted into the room.
“Mr. Wisant, you’re ‘on’ in ten minutes!” she cried, hopping with excitement. Then she saw Snowden. “Oh excuse me.”
“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Potter,” Wisant told her. “I’ll be there on cue.”
She nodded happily, made an odd pirouette, and darted out again. Simultaneously the orchestra outside, which sounded as if composed chiefly of flutes, clarinets and recorders, began warbling mysteriously.
Snowden took the opportunity to say quickly, “Listen to me, Joel. I’m worried about the way you’re driving yourself after the shock you had this morning. I thought that when you came home here you’d quit, but now I find that it’s just so you can participate in this community affair while keeping in touch at the same time with those NLA scares. Easy does it, Joel—Harker and Security Central can handle those things.”
Wisant looked at Snowden. “A man must attend to all his duties,” he said simply. “This is serious, Andy, and any minute you may be involved whether you like it or not. What do you think the dangers is of an outbreak at Serenity Shoals?”
“Outbreak?” Snowden said uneasily. “What do you mean?”
“I mean just that. You may think of your patients as children, Andy, but the cold fact is that you’ve got ten thousand dangerous maniacs not three miles from here under very inadequate guard. What if they are infected by the mass hysteria and stage an outbreak?”
Snowden frowned. “It’s true we have some inadequately trained personnel these days. But you’ve got the wrong picture of the situation. Emotionally sick people don’t stage mass outbreaks. They’re not syndicate crooks with smuggled guns and dynamite.”
“I’m not talking about plotted outbreaks. I’m talking about mass hysteria. If it can infect the sane, it can infect the insane. And I know the situation at Serenity Shoals has become very difficult—very difficult for you, Andy—with the overcrowding. I’ve been keeping in closer touch with that than you may know. I’m aware that you’ve petitioned that lobotomy, long-series electroshock, and heavy narcotics be reintroduced in general treatment.”
“You’ve got that wrong,” Snowden said sharply. “A minority of doctors—a couple of them with political connections—have so petitioned. I’m dead set against it myself.”
“But most families have given consent for lobotomies.”
“Most families don’t want to be bothered with the person who goes over the edge. They’re willing to settle for anything that will ‘soothe’ him.”
“Why do you headshrinkers always have to sneer at decent family feelings?” Wisant demanded stridently. “Now you’re talking like Cruxon.”
“I’m talking like myself! Cruxon was right about too much soothing syrup—especially the kind you put in with a needle or a knife.”
Wisant looked at him puzzledly. “I don’t understand you, Andy. You’ll have to do something to control your patients as the overcrowding mounts. With this epidemic mass hysteria you’ll have hundreds, maybe thousands of cases in the next few weeks. Serenity Shoals will become a…a Mind Bomb! I always thought of you as a realist, Andy.”
Snowden answered sharply, “And I think that when you talk of thousands of new cases, you’re extrapolating from too little data. ‘Dangerous maniacs’ and ‘mind bombs’ are theater talk—propaganda jargon. You can’t mean that, Joel.”
Wisant’s face was white, possibly with suppressed anger, and he was trembling very slightly. “You won’t say that, Andy, if your patients erupt out of Serenity Shoals and come pouring over the countryside in a great gush of madness.”
Snowden stared at him. “You’re afraid of them,” he said softly. “That’s it—you’re afraid of my loonies. At the back of your mind you’ve got some vision of a stampede of droolers with butcher knives.” Then he winced at his own words and slumped a little. “Excuse me, Joel,” he said, “but really, if you think Serenity Shoals is such a dangerous place, why did you let your daughter go there?”
“Because she is dangerous,” Wisant answered coldly. “I’m a realist, Andy.”
Snowden blinked and then nodded wearily, rubbing his eyes. “I’d forgotten about this morning.” He looked around. “Did it happen in this room?”
Wisant nodded.
“Where’s the pillow she chopped up?” Snowden asked callously.
Wisant pointed across the room at a box that was not only wrapped and sealed as if it contained infectious material, but also corded and the cord tied in an elaborate bow. “I thought it should be carefully preserved,” he said.
Snowden stared. “Did you wrap that box?”
“Yes. Why?”
Snowden said nothing.
Harker came in asking, “Been in touch with the Station the last five minutes, Joel? Two new outbreaks. A meeting of the League for Total Peace Through Total Disarmament reports that naked daggers appeared from nowhere and leaped through the air, chasing members and pinning the speaker to his rostrum by his jerkin. One man kept veiling about poltergeists—we got him. And the naked body of a man weighing 300 pounds fell spang in the middle of the Congress of the SPECP—that’s the Society for the Prevention of Emotional Cruelty to People. Turned out to be a week-old corpse stolen from City Hospital Morgue. Very fragrant. Joel, this mass-hysteria thing is broadening out.”
Wisant nodded and opened a drawer beside his bed.
Snowden snorted. “A solid corpse is about as far from mass hysteria as you can get,” he observed. “What do you want with that hot-rod, Joel?”
Wisant did not answer. Harker showed surprise.
“You stuck a heat-gun in your jerkin, Joel,” Snowden persisted. “Why?”
Wisant did not look at him, but waved sharply for silence. Mrs. Potter had come
scampering into the room, her green robes flying.
“You’re on, Mr. Wisant, you’re on!”
He nodded at her coolly and walked toward the door just as two unhappy-looking men in business jerkins and shorts appeared in it. One of them was carrying a rolled-up black blotter.
“Mr. Wisant, we want to talk to you,” Mr. Diskrow began. “I should say we have to talk to you. Dr. Gline and I were making some investigations at the IU offices—Mr. Cruxon’s in particular—and we found—”
“Later,” Wisant told them loudly as he strode by.
“Joel!” Harker called urgently, but Wisant did not pause or turn his head. He went out. The four men looked after him puzzledly.
The Twilight Tranquility Festival was approaching its muted climax. The Pixie and Fairies (girls) had danced their woodland ballet. The Leprechauns and Elves (boys) had made their Flashlight Parade. The Greenest Turf, the Growingest Garden, the Healthiest Tree, the Quietest ’Copter, the Friendliest House, the Rootedest Family, and many other silently superlative exurban items had been identified and duly admired. The orchestra had played all manner of forest, brook, and bird music. The Fauns and Pans (older boys) had sung “Tranquility So Masterful,” “These Everlasting Knolls,” the Safety Hymn, and “Come Let’s Steal Quietly.” The Sprites and Nymphs (older girls) had done their Candlelight Saraband. Representing religion, the local Zen Buddhist pastor (an old Caucasian Californian) had blessed the gathering with a sweet-sour wordlessness. And now the everpopular Pop Wisant was going to give his yearly talk and award trophies. (“It’s tremendous of him to give of himself this way,” one matron said, “after what he went through this morning. Did you know that she was stark naked? They wrapped a blanket around her to put her aboard the copter but she kept pulling it off.”)
Freshly cut boughs attached to slim magnesium scaffolding made, along with the real trees, a vast leafy bower out of what had this morning been an acre of lawn. Proud mothers in green robes and dutiful fathers in green jerkins lined the walls, shepherding their younger children. Before them stood a double line of Nymphs and Sprites in virginal white ballet costumes, each holding a tall white candle tipped with blue-hearted golden flame.