by Damon Knight
"What might that be?"
"War. Famine. Plague."
"How grim." The woman got up, swaying a little, and called to a man across the room. "Donald, haven't you got any good records?"
"You see," said Hamilton, "they won't listen. I think it's the most extraordinary thing."
"Well, she's drunk," Gene said.
"Yes, but you're not, and you're not really listening either, are you?"
"Did you say you'd published a book about this?"
"Yes. It sold two thousand copies in England. There were more babies born than that on the day of publication. The main culprit," he went on, "is modern medicine. If you wanted to do something useful for humanity, you could go back in a time machine and kill Pasteur."
"Are you serious?"
"Oh, absolutely. Until the end of the nineteenth century there was really no effective medicine for anything. Doctors weren't healers especially, they were diagnosticians -- their job was to identify the malady and tell the patient what to expect. Apart from that, and a lot of nostrums that didn't work, they just did palliative things -- sent people on ocean voyages, and so on. Well, in the twentieth century we've wiped out one disease after another, and the result is that there is no effective check on population. But people are breeding pretty much the way they always have, and you see the ghastly result. You're, what, about twenty?"
"Twenty-four."
"Well, with reasonable luck, you'll live long enough to see the big smash. I put it about ten years into the new century. We can't go on as we are much longer than that."
"You'd rather see people die of things like cholera, and typhoid?"
"It's not a question of wanting people to die. We're all going to die. The question is how many. People are going to die of plague and famine and war. The longer we put it off, the worse it will be."
"What's the answer, then? Birth control, education?"
"Yes. The only answer, except the three I mentioned."
"Will it work?"
After a moment Hamilton put his envelope away in his pocket. "No. Probably not. But one's got to try."
One spring in Rome, when Claudina was there, she took him to see an extraordinary exhibit. It was not in a gallery but in a cellar hired for the occasion, under an abandoned brewery. From the lobby where they bought their tickets they went down a steep flight of stairs into an unpleasant earth-smelling gloom. An attendant held a curtain open. "Per favore." Beyond the curtain they found themselves in a long, high chamber with a wooden hand-rail running down the middle. The only light came from dim hooded lamps aimed diagonally upward from the floor. Above each of these lights, as their eyes began to adjust, they could see a monstrous incomprehensible shape projecting from the wall. As they moved slowly down the room, each figure in turn became clearer. There were five: a king and a queen in tenth-century costume, a goat-horned demon, a nude and obese woman with a hood concealing her face, a hawk-headed image of the god Horus. The figures were carved of some grainless wood, stained red-brown; each one sat on a carved throne fixed to the wall, not upright but projecting horizontally, so that the vast malignant faces stared downward; and the figures were so massive, so arrogant in their perverse gravity that Gene and Claudina felt a kind of vertigo, as if they themselves, not the carved figures, were standing impossibly on a wall.
Afterward they met the artist, a haggard young man named Gianfranco Peganuzzi. His smile was wolfish; his English was very good.
"Where did you get the idea for those figures?" Gene asked.
"It was something in 'The Adventures of Augie March,' by Saul Bellow. His people were in a gallery in Paris, looking at some paintings from the Pinakothek, and Bellow wrote, 'These grand masterpieces were sitting on the walls.' At first I thought that was funny. Then I said to myself, 'Why not?' And then it grew."
He said that it had taken him five years to carve the figures; he had hollowed them out to reduce the weight, but, even so, each one weighed seven hundred pounds, and it had been necessary to attach them by means of bolts inserted through holes drilled in the masonry.
"Did you feel a dislocation, a nausea?" he asked.
"Yes," said C!audina, "very much. I understood then why there was a hand-rail. And after the exhibition, what will you do with them?"
He shrugged. "Maybe some museum will buy them, or some collector. Or maybe, if I get rich, I will build a gallery for them, underground -- in a castle which I will buy, you understand -- and leave them there. There will be no lights in the gallery. If you want to see them, you have to go there with flashlights." He grinned.
* * *
In 1972 Gene Anderson left the circus for good and took up residence in Athens, where there was an international community that he liked. Among his friends there was an Irish painter named Hugh Mulloy. Mulloy drank a good deal and quarreled with his wife, and sometimes when she locked him out he would go to one of his friends' apartments, climb down the fire escape, and get in through a window. They would find him the next morning asleep on the couch, or perhaps on the floor. People used to say, "Poor old Hugh." Everyone liked him, even when he was so drunk that he couldn't talk. He was an emaciated little man with ginger-colored hair and bright blue eyes. His favorite saying was, "Let's have another for the fun that's in it."
In the autumn of 1973 Gene was living in an old high-ceilinged apartment in the Patésia district; he had been there only a month or two. One night he had a bad dream, the kind in which the dreamer sees everything very clearly and knows what is happening, but is unable to move. In the dream, he was in an old house, perhaps a castle, with tall ceilings and casement windows. It was dark outside. Gene was lying in bed looking at one of the windows, and he knew that in a moment someone was going to try to get in and kill him. But he could not move; it was that kind of dream. He lay watching the window, and he saw a man's shape appear in the frame. Then he woke up with a jolt, covered with sweat, cold and shaking. The window in his room was partly open, but there was nobody there. He closed the window and turned on all the lights, and sat up until after dawn. For some reason the dream had made him think of the gigantic carved figures of Gianfranco Peganuzzi, and he wondered if they were brooding somewhere in the darkness underground.
About a week later, someone asked him if he had seen Hugh. His friends compared notes; it turned out that no one had seen him since the day before Gene's nightmare; and no one ever saw him again.
Gene believed he knew what had happened. Hugh had been to his new apartment only once, and didn't know where all the rooms were. He must have come down the fire escape on the wrong side, and tried to get into Gene's bedroom window instead of the window in the living room; and Gene, half-aware in his sleep, had destroyed him -- made him nonexistent, thrown him out of the world forever.
He went to see Hugh's wife and gave her some money, and got away as soon as he could; he was unable to bear her gratitude. He flew to London and talked to a marine architect, who designed for him a sixty-foot cutter-rigged sloop with a cabin and galley tall enough for him to stand upright. He took instruction in sailing and seamanship; a year later, when Sea Sprite was ready, he hired a deckhand-cook named Richards and sailed across the Atlantic. From that day onward, he never spent a night ashore in a room that had a window that could be reached from the outside.
Chapter Seventeen
On the Gulf coast outside St. Petersburg there is a chain of islands connected by causeways to each other and to the mainland; the islands form a strip twenty-five miles long and in places no more than a few hundred yards wide: St. Petersburg Beach, Treasure Island, Madeira Beach, Redington Beach, Indian Rocks. The southern end is heavily commercialized, with many luxury hotels and condominiums; then, as you go northward, the tourist cabins on the ocean side become progressively smaller and shabbier, the beach sadder and more desolate.
Margaret Morrow, freshly arrived from Albany, found a tourist cabin, one of six with identical peeling green paint and pink trim, at the upper end of Indian Rocks Beach;
the place was called Site O'Sea. The owner and manager was an old woman with frizzy lemon-colored hair who wore muu-muus and carpet slippers, and called Margaret "Dearie." The cabin was a single room with a tiny kitchenette, a sofa bed, and an air conditioner that hummed and dripped all day long. The windows, of narrow glass panes that overlapped each other like the siding on a house, were gummy with salt spray, and the sand drifted in under the doorsill.
It was hard to get used to the strong sunlight, the bright pastel colors like a child's painting, the cleanness of everything. Sand was everywhere, drifted against the sides of houses, scattering in the wind across the highway; it got into your hair, your ears, and, if you were not careful, into your food, but there was no dirt, no grime. On the beach, at certain hours, the gulls and terns gathered in convention -- just standing around, blinking wearily, the gulls and terns in separate groups but side by side, like businessmen waiting for a tour bus. Cormorants sat on the pilings of the groins, spreading their huge wings to dry. The sun on the water was piercingly white, painful to look at even through dark glasses. In the evening skimmers glided over the shallow water, scooping up something with their open beaks; the sun spread vast robes of pink and gold over half the sky, and the wind rattled the dry fronds of the palm trees.
On her second day she bought a newspaper and rode the bus into St. Petersburg. After Albany, the wide streets seemed almost empty. She filled out applications in three employment agencies. On the third day she answered advertisements in the paper and was interviewed, but not hired, by an insurance company, a stock broker, and a home finance agency. The next day was Saturday. She spent the weekend writing postcards, swimming, and walking on the beach. In a grocery bag she collected several pounds of shells and pebbles.
On Monday she applied for a waitress job in a coffee shop in Treasure Island; the manager said he would let her know. Walking back toward the bus stop, she noticed a sign she had not seen before: it was an employment agency, a tiny place tucked in between a drugstore and a real-estate office.
The woman behind the desk was a fortyish blonde in a startling blouse of blue and yellow trapezoids. She looked at Margaret's application without putting down her cigarette. "Well, let's see. You haven't had much business experience, have you?"
"No, but I can type and take shorthand."
"I see you were a teacher before -- why did you give that up?"
"Not cut out for it, I guess."
The woman gave her an indifferent look. "Uh-huh. How good is your shorthand ?"
"Not very, but I can brush up."
"Well, here's a filing job -- you say you don't want that -- filing and bookkeeping. . . . Here's one, secretary, part time, some filing and bookkeeping. Salary open, that means it probably isn't much."
"What sort of place is it?"
"Not a place, it's the man's home. Occupation, investor. Do you have a car?"
"No -- not yet."
"Well, it's back in the boonies, but it says here, 'Will pick up for interview.'"
"I'd like to try it."
"All right." The woman picked up the phone, squinting past the smoke of her cigarette. "Mr. Anderson, please. . . . Well, would you tell him that Mrs. Harrell of Suncoast Employment called. We have an applicant for the secretary job, and she'd like to be picked up for an interview. . . . Just a moment." She covered the phone. "Can you go out there this afternoon?"
"Yes."
"Yes, that will be fine. Her name is Margaret Morrow. Two o'clock?" She lifted an eyebrow at Margaret. "All right, thank you."
She put the phone down. "Somebody will pick you up here at two. The office will be closed until twelve-thirty, but you can come back here any time after that. Whether you get the job or not, please remember to check back and let us know; that's important."
Margaret went back to the coffee shop, had a sandwich and a glass of milk, then browsed in the tourist shops until almost two.
In the waiting room sat a man in a blue flowered shirt. He was partly bald, compactly built, tanned the color of mahogany. There was a cold cigar stub in his mouth. He got up and put on a blue straw hat. "Miss Morrow?"
"Yes."
He looked up at her. "Well, you're tall enough, anyhow. My name is Bill Richards. Come on."
He led her to a dusty blue Lincoln convertible parked at the curb. "I haven't seen one of these in years," she remarked as she got in.
"They just started making them again." Richards pulled out into the street, made a startling U-turn and headed north. "Been here long?" he said around the cigar.
"No, only a week."
"Figures." He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye; his expression did not change, but she thought he was amused. "Get a little sunburn?"
"A little."
"Thought so." His muscular arms were covered with coarse black hair; his fingers were blunt and spatulate, but his nails were clean.
"Mr. Richards, what does Mr. Anderson do?"
"A little of this, a little of that." He gave her a faint smile. "Mr. Anderson," he said, "is a very big man."
They were running across the causeway, the water sparkling white beneath them; then around the curve of the road, past Spanish-looking villas with palm trees, up the gentle rise that passed for a hill in Florida. After a few miles the car slowed, turned to the left onto a macadam road that quickly became white dust, bordered with yucca and palmetto. They turned again, running now between fenced pastures where brown and white cattle grazed; then once more, into a road marked "Private." Up ahead was a real hill covered with trees, a wall, a cluster of rooftops.
They halted in a wide archway closed by a wrought-iron gate. Richards rolled down his window and spoke to a grille in the wall. "Irma, open up." Beyond his head, Margaret could see a lens swiveling to point at them. "Okay," said a metallic voice. The gate swung open, they drove through past flowering bushes, a vast stretch of new lawn with sprinklers playing on it. Where the driveway leveled off, the house was too close to see, but she caught a glimpse of tall stucco walls, wrought-iron balconies.
They swung into the cool shadow of a carport. Richards led her up three steps to an enormously tall door of carved wood; he opened it and ushered her into a huge kitchen where a blond woman was sitting with a telephone in her hand. "I understand that, Mr. Lyons," she was saying, "But Mr. Anderson wants me to tell you that if we can't get better service, we'll have to look for another supplier." She smiled at Margaret and pointed to a chair at the long table.
Richards had disappeared; he came back carrying a cardboard carton full of packages and letters, which he set down on the table, then went out again.
The blond woman put down the phone. She was in her forties, a little plump in a candy-striped blouse and blue shorts; her legs were bare and tanned. "I'm Irma Hartz," she said. "You're Miss Morrow, from the agency?" "Yes."
"Nice to meet you. Want to go to the bathroom or anything before we start?"
"No, I'm fine."
"All right, let's go." When she stood up, Margaret noticed that her brown feet were bare. She led the way across the kitchen. The chair at the far end of the table stood in a curious sunken area, a foot or two lower than the rest of the floor. They passed into a tiled hallway, down a gentle ramp, and emerged into a vast space with a cathedral ceiling; it must have been thirty feet high. There were Oriental rugs on the tile floor; the walls were oyster white. To their left a broad ramp rose to a balcony at the far end of the room. Under the balcony, through sliding glass doors, she glimpsed a colonnade and a garden with a fountain. The room itself was enormous, more like a museum hall than a living room. The middle part of it was sunken, with a wrought-iron railing around it.
She followed Mrs. Hartz down a hall lined with pictures to a room fitted out with filing cabinets, a desk, an electronic typewriter. "Sit down, honey, and let's talk." Mrs. Hartz took a seat behind a second, smaller desk, and peered at her over her glasses. "Your name is Margaret Morrow -- just like it sounds?"
"Yes."
&n
bsp; Mrs. Hartz wrote on a yellow pad. "Age?"
"Thirty."
"M arried?"
"No."
"What was your last job?"
"I was a schoolteacher in Albany."
"Albany, New York? Why did you leave?"
Margaret was silent a moment.
"Honey," said Mrs. Hartz, "I don't want to be nosy, but I have to know all this stuff. If you were fired, you can tell me."
"No, I wasn't fired," Margaret said. "Maybe I was burned out. My mother died in February. She was bedridden for seven years. And -- " She stopped and went on again, trying to keep her voice level. "I don't know, the middle school I taught in was consolidated with a high school that wasn't as good, and some of our programs went downhill. It stopped being fun. One day I caught myself hating one of the kids. It scared me, I thought maybe I was cracking up. The only thing I could think of was just to get out of Albany, and I came here because of the sunshine."