“You want any food or drink,” the servant told her, “and you just press that button. The results will surprise you.”
“What about Mr. Gorka?”
“When he wants you, he will send for you. Meanwhile, make yourself to home, lady, and I will tell him you are here.”
A little doubtful, now, Matilda thanked him and watched him leave. He closed the door softly behind his retreating feet, but Matilda’s ears had not missed the ominous click. She ran to the door and tried to open it, but it would not budge. It was locked—from the outside.
It must be said to Matilda’s credit that she sobbed only once. After that, she realized that what is done is done, and here, past thirty, she wasn’t going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a neurotic servant.
For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn’t last long, however: she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to her overwrought nerves.
At that point she remembered what the servant had said about food, and she thought at once of the supreme justice she could do to a juicy beefsteak. Well, maybe they didn’t have a beefsteak. In that case, she would take what they had, and, accordingly, she walked to the little slot in the wall and pressed the button.
She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup, mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root beer, a par-fait—and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce.
Matilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again—but by then her salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorka’s neurotic servant.
When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.
The feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka’s servant, and he said, “Mr. Gorka will see you now.”
“Now?”
“Now. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”
He had a point there, but Matilda hardly had time even to fix her hair. She told the servant so.
“Miss,” he replied, “I assure you it will not matter in the least to Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all that matters.”
“You sure?” Matilda wanted to take no chances.
“Yes. Come.”
She followed him out of the little room and across what should have been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her own, and that each, in turn, had already had her first visit with Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him better than did all the rest; and later, when she returned to tell the old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and compare notes.
She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was just that he was so ordinary-looking. She would almost have preferred the monster of her dreams.
He wore a white linen suit and had mousy hair, drab eyes, an almost Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist at each corner.
He said, “Greetings. You have come—”
“In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?”
She hoped she wasn’t being too formal. But then, there was no sense assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to keep in the middle of the road.
“I am fine. Are you ready?”
“Ready?”
“Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do you not?”
“I—do.” Matilda had had visions of her Prince Charming sitting back and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to know the man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.
“I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for dinner,” she told him brightly.
“Eh ? What say ? Oh, yes, naturally. A combination of telepathy and teleportation. The synthetic cookery is attuned to your mind when you press the buzzer, and the strength of your psychic impulses determines how closely the meal will adjust to your desires. The fact that the adjustment here was near perfect is commendable. It means either that you have a high psi quotient or that you were very hungry.”
“Yes,” said Matilda vaguely. Perhaps it might be better, after all, if Haron Gorka were to talk to her as he saw fit.
“Ready?”
“Uh-ready.”
“Well?”
“Well what, Mr. Gorka?”
“What would you like me to talk about?”
“Oh, anything.”
“Please. As the ad read, my universal experience—is universal. Literally. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me about some of your far travels? Unfortunately, while I’ve done a lot of reading, I haven’t been to all the places I would have liked—”
“Good enough. You know, of course, how frigid Deneb VII is?”
Matilda said, “Beg pardon?”
“Well, there was the time our crew—before I had retired, of course —made a crash landing there. We could survive in the vac suits, of course, but the thlomots were after us almost at once. They go mad over plastic. They will eat absolutely any sort of plastic. Our vac suits—”
“—were made of plastic,” Matilda suggested. She did not understand a thing he was talking about, but she felt she should act bright.
“No, no. Must you interrupt ? The air hose and the water feed, those were plastic. Not the rest of the suit. The point is that half of us were destroyed before the rescue ship could come, and the remainder were near death. I owe my life to the mimicry of a flaak from Capella III. It assumed the properties of plastic and led the thlomots a merry chase across the frozen surface of D VII. You travel in the Deneb system now, and Interstellar Ordinance makes it mandatory to carry flaaks with you. Excellent idea, really excellent.”
Almost at once, Matilda’s educational background should have told her that Haron Gorka was mouthing gibberish. But on the other hand she wanted to believe in him, and the result was that it took until now for her to realize it.
“Stop making fun of me,” she said.
“So, naturally, you’ll see flaaks all over that system—”
“Stop!”
“What’s that? Making fun of you?” Haron Gorka’s voice had been so eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child’s, and now he seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of resignation, and he said, “Very well. I’m wrong again. You are the sixth, and you’re no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again, she is right and I am wrong. . . .”
Haron Gorka turned his back.
Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed, not without surprise, that the other five cars were now gone.
She was the last of Haron Gorka’s guests to depart.
As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly. Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all alone.
As she drove back to town, the disappointment slowly melted away. There were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in particular about places that had no existence outside his mind, his voice high-pitched and eager.
It was not until she had passed the small library building that she remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it outside the library.
The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her: gray, broomstick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up visibly.
“Hello, my dear,” she said.
“Hi.”
“You’re back a bit sooner than I expected. But then, the other five have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.”
“I don’t know what they told you,” Matilda said. “But this is what happened to me.”
She then related quickly everything that had happened, completely and in detail. She did this first because it was a promise and second because she knew it would make her feel better.
“So,” she finished, “Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or insane. I’m sorry.”
“He’s neither,” the librarian contradicted. “Perhaps he is slightly eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did he leave a message for his wife?”
“Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the five.”
“No. He didn’t. But you were the last, and I thought he would give you a message for his wife—”
Matilda didn’t understand. She didn’t understand at all, but she told the little librarian what the message was. “He wanted her to return,” she said.
The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you something.”
“What’s that?”
“I am Mrs. Gorka.”
The librarian stood up and came around the desk. She opened a drawer and took out her hat and perched it jauntily atop her gray hair. “You see, my dear, Haron expects too much. He expects entirely too much.”
Matilda did not say a word. One madman a day would be quite enough for anybody, but here she found herself confronted by a second.
“We’ve been tripping for centuries, visiting every habitable star system from our home near Canopus. But Haron is too demanding. He says I am a finicky traveler, that he could do much better alone, the accommodations have to be just right for me, and so forth. When he loses his temper, he tries to convince me that any number of females of the particular planet would be more than thrilled if they were given the opportunity just to listen to him.
“But he’s wrong. It’s a hard life for a woman. Some day—five thousand, ten thousand years from now—I will convince him. And then we will settle down on Canopus XIV and cultivate torgas. That would be so nice—”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, if Haron wants me back, then I have to go. Have a care, my dear. If you marry, choose a homebody. I’ve had the experience, and you’ve seen my Haron for yourself.”
And then the woman was gone. Numbly, Matilda walked to the doorway and watched her angular figure disappear down the road. Of all the crazy things. . . .
Deneb and Capella and Canopus, those were stars. Add a number, and you might have a planet revolving about each star. Of all the insane—
They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually, they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter Matilda would seek the happy medium.
And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen-pal columns. They were, she realized, for kids.
~ * ~
She ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then went out to her car again, preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale rainbow bridge in the sky.
Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon, and that was the direction of Haron Gorka’s place.
The glow increased; soon it was a bright red pulse pounding on the horizon. It flickered. It flickered again, and finally it was gone.
The stars were white and brilliant in the clear country air. That was why Matilda liked the country better than the city, particularly on a clear summer night when you could see the span of the Milky Way.
But, abruptly, the stars and the Milky Way were paled by the brightest shooting star Matilda had ever seen. It flashed suddenly and remained in view for a full second, searing a bright orange path across the night sky.
Matilda gasped and rushed into her car. She meshed the gears and pressed the accelerator to the floor, keeping it there all the way home.
It was the first time she had ever seen a shooting star going up.
<
~ * ~
A. E. Van Vogt
NOT ONLY DEAD MEN
In this last tale from the Immediate Past, some sort of saurian visitants are in trouble and land their spaceship on Earth, near a whaling vessel peacefully pursuing its maritime affairs. The spaceship is fleeing from another sort of alien, a true monster that is a threat to both human and saurian.
The solution to this fantastic three-way struggle is one that—in the final paragraph or so of the story—provides one with a dizzying expansion of horizon that suddenly becomes Galaxy-wide in scope. Curiously enough, this enormous change is somehow comforting to the human animal, who until now has felt his bitter aloneness in the Cosmos.
For we are not alone, this story says; we are not alone. . . .
~ * ~
WHALESHIP FOUND
BATTERED DERELICT OFF
NORTHERN ALASKA
June 29, 1942—Smashed in every timber, and with no trace of the crew, the whaleship Albatross was found today by an American patrol ship in the Bering Strait. Naval authorities are mystified by reports that the deck and sides of the schooner were staved in as by gigantic blows not caused “by bombs, torpedoes, shellfire, or other enemy action,” according to the word received. The galley stoves were said to be still warm, and, as there have been no storms in this region for three weeks, no explanation has been forthcoming.
The Albatross sailed from a West Coast American port early in March, with Captain Frank Wardell and a crew of eighteen, all of whom are missing.
~ * ~
Captain Wardell, of the whaleship Albatross, was thinking so darkly of the three long whaleless months just past that he had started to edge the schooner through the narrows before he saw the submarine lying near the shore in the sheltered waters of that far-northern bay of Alaska.
His mind did a spinning dive into blankness. When he came up for air, his reflexes were already working. The engine-room indicator stood at reverse full speed. And his immediate plan was as clear as it was simple.
He parted his lips to shout at the wheelman, then closed them again, made for the wheel, and, as the ship began to go backward, guided her deftly behind the line of shoals and the headland of trees. The anchor went down with a rattle and a splash that echoed strangely in the windless morning.
Silence settled where the man-made sound had been; and there was only the quiet ripple of that remote northern sea, the restless waters lapping gently against the Albatross, washing more sullenly over the sh
oals behind which she lay, and occasionally letting out a roar as a great wave smashed with a white fury at a projecting rock.
Wardell, back on the small bridge, stood very still, letting his mind absorb impressions, and—listening.
But no alien sound came to disturb his straining ears, no Diesel engines raging into life, no fainter hum of powerful electric motors. He began to breathe more steadily. He saw that his first mate, Preedy, had slipped softly up beside him.
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