A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Okay.’ The nervousness was gone now, replaced by an ugly truculence. ‘Chew’m up and spit’m in your gas tank. See how far you can run on them.’

  The situation was not unanticipated. Indeed, Mr Jimmon thought with satisfaction of how much worse it must be closer to Los Angeles; how much harder the gouger would be on later supplicants as his supply of gasoline dwindled. ‘Listen,’ he said, and there was reasonableness rather than anger in his voice, ‘we’re not out of gas. I’ve got enough to get to Santa Maria, even to San Luis Obispo.’

  ‘Okay. Go on then. Ain’t stopping you.’

  ‘Listen. I understand your position. You have a right to make a profit in spite of government red tape.’

  Nervousness returned to the man’s speech. ‘Look, whyn’t you go on? There’s plenty other stations up ahead.’

  The reluctant bandit. Mr Jimmon was entertained. He had fully intended to bargain, to offer $2 a gallon, even to threaten with the pistol in the glove compartment. Now it seemed mean and niggling even to protest. What good was money now? ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll pay you $5 a gallon.’

  Still the other made no move. ‘In advance.’

  For the first time Mr Jimmon was annoyed; time was being wasted. ‘Just how can I pay you in advance when I don’t know how many gallons it’ll take to fill the tank?’

  The man shrugged.

  ‘Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll pay for each gallon as you pump it. In advance.’ He drew out a handful of bills; the bulk of his money was in his wallet, but he’d put the small bills in his pockets. He handed over a five. ‘Spill the first one on the ground or in a can if you’ve got one.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  Why should I tell him; give him ideas? As if he hadn’t got them already. ‘Just call me eccentric,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the first gallon from the pump. Why should you care? It’s just five dollars more profit.’

  For a moment Mr Jimmon thought the man was going to refuse, and he regarded his foresight with new reverence. Then he reached behind the pump and produced a flat-sided tin in which he inserted the flexible end of the hose. Mr Jimmon handed over the bill, the man wound the handle round and back – it was an ancient gas pump such as Mr Jimmon hadn’t seen for years – and lifted the drooling hose from the can.

  ‘Minute,’ said Mr Jimmon.

  He stuck two fingers quickly and delicately inside the nozzle and smelled them. Gas all right, not water. He held out a ten-dollar bill. ‘Start filling.’

  Jir and Wendell appeared out of the shadows. ‘Can we stop at a town where there’s a movie tonight?’

  The handle turned, a cog-toothed rod crept up and retreated, gasoline gurgled into the tank. Movies, thought Mr Jimmon, handing over another bill; movies, rest rooms, baths, restaurants. Gouge apprehensively lest a scene be made and propriety disturbed. In a surrealist daydream he saw Molly turning the crank, grinding him on the cogs, pouring his essence into insatiable Jir and Wendell. He held out $20.

  Twelve gallons had been put in when Molly appeared. ‘You have a phone here?’ he asked casually. Knowing the answer from the blue enamelled sign not quite lost among less sturdy ones advertising soft drinks and cigarettes.

  ‘You want to call the cops?’ He didn’t pause in his pumping.

  ‘No. Know if the lines to LA’ – Mr Jimmon loathed the abbreviation – ‘are open yet?’ He gave him another ten.

  ‘How should I know?’

  Mr Jimmon beckoned his wife around the other side of the wagon, out of sight. Swiftly but casually he extracted the contents of his wallet. The 200 dollar bills made a fat lump. ‘Put this in your bag,’ he said. ‘Tell you why later. Meantime why don’t you try and get Pearl and Dan on the phone? See if they’re okay?’

  He imagined the puzzled look on her face. ‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘We can spare a minute while he’s checking the oil.’

  He thought there was a hint of uncertainty in Molly’s walk as she went towards the store. Erika joined her brothers. The tank gulped: gasoline splashed on the concrete. ‘Guess that’s it.’

  The man became suddenly brisk as he put up the hose, screwed the gas cap back on. Mr Jimmon had already disengaged the hood; the man offered the radiator a squirt of water, pulled up the oil gauge, wiped it, plunged it down, squinted at it under the light, and said, ‘Oil’s OK.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mr Jimmon. ‘Get in Erika.’

  Some of the light shone directly on her face. Again he noted how mature and self-assured she looked. Erika would survive – and not as a savage either. The man started to wipe the windshield. ‘Oh, Jir,’ he said casually, ‘run in and see if your mother is getting her connection. Tell her we’ll wait.’

  ‘Aw furcrysay. I don’t see why I always –’

  ‘And ask her to buy a couple of boxes of candy bars if they’ve got them. Wendell, go with Jir, will you?’

  He slid in behind the wheel and closed the door gently. The motor started with hardly a sound. As he put his foot on the clutch and shifted into low he thought Erika turned to him with a startled look. As the station wagon moved forward, he was sure of it.

  ‘It’s all right, Erika,’ said Mr Jimmon. ‘I’ll explain later.’ He’d have lots of time to do it.

  Skirmish

  CLIFFORD SIMAK

  It was a good watch. It had been a good watch for more than thirty years. His father had owned it first, and his mother had saved it for him after his father died and had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday. For all the years since then it had served him faithfully.

  But now, comparing it with the clock on the newsroom wall, looking from his wrist to the big face of the clock over the coat cabinets, Joe Crane was forced to admit that his watch was wrong. It was an hour fast. His watch said seven o’clock and the clock on the wall insisted it was only six.

  Come to think of it, it had seemed unusually dark driving down to work, and the streets had appeared singularly deserted.

  He stood quietly in the empty newsroom, listening to the muttering of the row of teletype machines. Overhead lights shone here and there, gleaming on waiting telephones, on typewriters, on the china whiteness of the pastepots huddled in a group on the copy desk.

  Quiet now, he thought, quiet and peace and shadows, but in another hour the place would spring to life. Ed Lane, the news editor, would arrive at six-thirty, and shortly after that Frank McKay, the city editor, would come lumbering in.

  Crane put up a hand and rubbed his eyes. He could have used that extra hour of sleep. He could have –

  Wait a minute! He had not got up by the watch upon his wrist. The alarm clock had awakened him. And that meant the alarm clock was an hour fast, too.

  ‘It don’t make sense,’ said Crane, aloud.

  He shuffled past the copy desk, heading for his chair and typewriter. Something moved on the desk alongside the typewriter – a thing that glinted, rat-sized and shiny and with a certain undefinable manner about it that made him stop short in his tracks with a sense of gulping emptiness in his throat and belly.

  The thing squatted beside the typewriter and stared across the room at him. There was no sign of eyes, no hint of face, and yet he knew it stared.

  Acting almost instinctively, Crane reached out and grabbed a pastepot off the copy desk. He hurled it with a vicious motion and it became a white blur in the lamplight, spinning end over end. It caught the staring thing squarely, lifted it, and swept it off the desk. The pastepot hit the floor and broke, scattering broken shards and oozy gobs of half-dried paste.

  The shining thing hit the floor somersaulting. Its feet made metallic sounds as it righted itself and dashed across the floor.

  Crane’s hand scooped up a spike, heavily weighted with metal. He threw it with a sudden gush of hatred and revulsion. The spike hit the floor with a thud ahead of the running thing and drove its point deep into the wood.

  The metal rat made splinters fly as it changed its course. Desperately it flung itself through the three-inc
h opening of a supply cabinet door.

  Crane sprinted swiftly, hit the door with both his hands, and slammed it shut.

  ‘Got you,’ he said.

  He thought about it, standing with his back against the door.

  Scared, he thought. Scared silly by a shining thing that looked something like a rat. Maybe it was a rat, a white rat.

  And, yet, it hadn’t had a tail. It didn’t have a face. Yet it had looked at him.

  Crazy, he said. Crane, you’re going nuts.

  It didn’t quite make sense. It didn’t fit into this morning of 18 October 1962. Nor into the twentieth century. Nor into normal human life.

  He turned around, grasped the doorknob firmly, and wrenched, intending to throw it wide open in one sudden jerk. But the knob slid beneath his fingers and would not move, and the door stayed shut.

  Locked, thought Crane. The lock snapped home when I slammed the door. And I haven’t got the key. Dorothy Graham has the key, but she always leaves the door open because it’s hard to get it open once it’s locked. She almost always has to call one of the janitors. Maybe there’s some of the maintenance men around. Maybe I should hunt one up and tell him –

  Tell him what? Tell him I saw a metal rat run into the cabinet? Tell him I threw a pastepot at it and knocked it off the desk? That I threw a spike at it, too, and to prove it, there’s the spike sticking in the floor?

  Crane shook his head.

  He walked over to the spike and yanked it from the floor. He put the spike back on the copy desk and kicked the fragments of the pastepot out of sight.

  At his own desk, he selected three sheets of paper and rolled them into the typewriter.

  The machine started to type. All by itself without his touching it! He sat stupefied and watched its keys go up and down. It typed: Keep out of this, Joe, don’t mix into this. You might get hurt.

  Joe Crane pulled the sheets of copy paper out of the machine. He balled them in his fist and threw them into a waste-basket. Then he went out to get a cup of coffee.

  ‘You know, Louie,’ he said to the man behind the counter, ‘a man lives alone too long and he gets to seeing things.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Louie. ‘Me, I’d go nuts in that place of yours. Rattling around in it empty-like. Should have sold it when your old lady passed on.’

  ‘Couldn’t,’ said Crane. ‘It’s been my home too long.’

  ‘Ought to get married off, then,’ said Louie. ‘Ain’t good to live by yourself.’

  ‘Too late now,’ Crane told him. ‘There isn’t anyone who would put up with me.’

  ‘I got a bottle hid out,’ said Louie. ‘Couldn’t give you none across the counter, but I could put some in your coffee.’

  Crane shook his head. ‘Got a hard day coming up.’

  ‘You sure? I won’t charge you for it. Just old friends.’

  ‘No. Thank you, Louie.’

  ‘You been seeing things?’ asked Louie in a questioning voice.

  ‘Seeing things?’

  ‘Yeah. You said a man lives too much alone and he gets to seeing things.’

  ‘Just a figure of speech,’ said Crane.

  He finished the cup of coffee quickly and went back to the office.

  The place looked more familiar now. Ed Lane was there, cussing out a copy boy. Frank McKay was clipping the opposition morning sheet. A couple of other reporters had drifted in.

  Crane took a quick look at the supply cabinet door. It was still shut.

  The phone on McKay’s desk buzzed and the city editor picked it up. He listened for a moment, then took it down from his ear and held his hand over the mouthpiece.

  ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘take this. Some screwball claims he met a sewing machine coming down the street.’

  Crane reached for his phone. ‘Give me the call on 245,’ he told the operator.

  A voice was saying in his ear. ‘This is the Herald? This is the Herald? Hello, there…’

  ‘This is Crane,’ said Joe.

  ‘I want the Herald,’ said the man. ‘I want to tell ’em…’

  ‘This is Crane of the Herald,’ Crane told him. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘You a reporter?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m a reporter.’

  ‘Then listen close. I’ll try to tell this slow and easy and just the way it happened. I was walking down the street, see…’

  ‘What street?’ asked Crane. ‘And what is your name?’

  ‘East Lake,’ said the caller. ‘The five-or six-hundred block. I don’t remember which. And I met this sewing machine rolling along the street and I thought, thinking the way you would, you know, if you met a sewing machine – I thought somebody had been rolling it along and it had gotten away from them. Although that is funny, because the street is level. There’s no grade to it at all, you see. Sure, you know the place. Level as the palm of your hand. And there wasn’t a soul in sight. It was early morning, see…’

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Crane.

  ‘My name? Smith, that’s my name. Jeff Smith. And so I figured maybe I’d ought to help this guy the sewing machine had gotten away from, so I put out my hand to stop it and it dodged. It –’

  ‘It did what?’ yelped Crane.

  ‘It dodged. So help me, mister. When I put my hand out to stop it, it dodged out of the way so I couldn’t catch it. As if it knew I was trying to catch it, see, and it didn’t want to be caught. So it dodged out of the way and went around me and down the street as fast as it could go, picking up speed as it went. And when it got to the corner, it turned the corner as slick as you please and –’

  ‘What’s your address?’ asked Crane.

  ‘My address? Say, what do you want my address for? I was telling you about this sewing machine. I called you up to give you a story and you keep interrupting –’

  ‘I’ve got to have your address,’ Crane told him, ‘if I’m going to write the story.’

  ‘Oh, all right then, if that’s the way it is. I live at 203 North Hampton and I work at Axel Machines. Run a lathe, you know. And I haven’t had a drink in weeks. I’m cold sober now.’

  ‘All right,’ said Crane. ‘Go ahead and tell me.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t much else to tell. Only when this machine went past me I had the funny feeling that it was watching me. Out of the corner of its eyes, kind of. And how is a sewing machine going to watch you? A sewing machine hasn’t got any eyes and…’

  ‘What made you think it was watching you?’

  ‘I don’t know, mister. Just a feeling. Like my skin was trying to roll up my back.’

  ‘Mr Smith,’ asked Crane, ‘have you ever seen a thing like this before? Say, a washing machine, or something else?’

  ‘I ain’t drunk,’ said Smith. ‘Haven’t had a drop in weeks. I never saw nothing like this before. But I’m telling you the truth, mister. I got a good reputation. You can call up anyone and ask them. Call Johnny Jacobson up at the Red Rooster grocery. He knows me. He can tell you about me. He can tell you –’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Crane, pacifying him. ‘Thanks for calling, Mr Smith.’

  You and a guy named Smith, he told himself. Both of you are nuts. You saw a metal rat and your typewriter talked back at you, and now this guy meets a sewing machine strolling down the street.

  Dorothy Graham, the managing editor’s secretary, went past his desk, walking rapidly, her high heels coming down with decisive clicks. Her face was flushed an angry pink and she was jingling a ring of keys in her hands.

  ‘What’s the matter, Dorothy?’ Crane asked.

  ‘It’s that damn door again,’ she said. ‘The one to the supply cabinet. I just know I left it open and now some goof comes along and closes it and the lock snaps.’

  ‘Keys won’t open it?’ asked Crane.

  ‘Nothing will open it,’ she snapped. ‘Now I’ve got to get George up here again. He knows how to do it. Talks to it or something. It makes me so mad – Boss called up last night and said for me to be down e
arly and get the wire recorder for Albertson. He’s going out on that murder trial up north and wants to get some of the stuff down on tape. So I get up early, and what does it get me? I lose my sleep and don’t even stop for breakfast and now…’

  ‘Get an axe,’ said Crane. ‘That will open it.’

  ‘The worst of it,’ said Dorothy, ‘is that George never gets the lead out. He always says he’ll be right up and then I wait and wait and I call again and he says –’

  ‘Crane!’ McKay’s roar echoed through the room.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Crane.

  ‘Anything to that sewing machine story?’

  ‘Guy says he met one.’

  ‘Anything to it?’

  ‘How the hell would I know? I got the guy’s word, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, call up some other people down in that neighbourhood. Ask them if they saw a sewing machine running around loose. Might be good for a humorous piece.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Crane.

  He could imagine it:

  ‘This is Crane at the Herald. Got a report there’s a sewing machine running around loose down in your neighbourhood. Wondering if you saw anything of it. Yes, lady, that’s what I said… a sewing machine running around. No, ma’am, no one was pushing it. Just running around…’

  He slouched out of his chair, went over to the reference table, picked up the city directory, and lugged it back to the desk. Doggedly he opened the book, located the East Lake listings, and made some notes of names and addresses. He dawdled, reluctant to start phoning. He walked to the window and looked out at the weather. He wished he didn’t have to work. He thought of the kitchen sink at home. Plugged up again. He’d taken it apart, and there were couplings and pipes and union joints spread all over the place. Today, he thought, would be a nice day to fix that sink.

  When he went back to the desk, McKay came and stood over him.

  ‘What do you think of it, Joe?’

  ‘Screwball,’ said Crane, hoping McKay would call it off.

  ‘Good feature story, though,’ said the editor. ‘Have some fun with it.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Crane.

  McKay left and Crane made some calls. He got the sort of reaction that he expected.