Backteria and Other Improbable Tales

by Richard Matheson

  Joe stropped the straight razor, humming nervously to himself while the man eat motionless in the chair.

  “Hurry,” the man said.

  “Yes, sir,” Joe said, “right away.” He stropped the razor blade once more, then let go of the black strap. It swung down end bumped once against the back of the chair.

  Joe drew the skin taut and shaved around the man’s right ear.

  “I should have stayed,” the man said.

  “Sir?”

  The man said nothing. Joe swallowed uneasily and went on shaving, breathing through his mouth in order to avoid the smell which kept getting worse.

  “Hurry,” the man said.

  “Goin’ as fast as I can,” Joe said, a little irritably.

  “I should have stayed.”

  Joe shivered for some reason. “He finished in a second,” he said. The man kept staring at his lap, his body motionless on the chair, his hands still in his coat pockets.

  “Why?” the man said.

  “What?” Joe asked.

  “Does it keep growing?”

  Joe looked blank. He glanced at the man’s reflection again, feeling something tighten in his stomach. He tried to grin.

  “That’s life,” he said, weakly, and finished up with the Shaving as quickly as he could. He wiped off the lather with a clean towel, noticing how starkly white the man’s skin was where the hair had been shaved away.

  He started automatically for the water bottle to clean off the man’s neck and around the ears. Then he stopped himself and turned back. He sprinkled powder on the brush and spread it around the man’s neck. The sweetish smell of the clouding powder mixed with the other heavier smell.

  “Comb it wet or dry?” Joe asked.

  The man didn’t answer. Nervously, trying not to breaths anymore than necessary, Joe ran the comb through the man’s hair without touching it with his fingers. He parted it on the left side and combed and brushed it back.

  Now, for the first time, the man’s lifeless eyes raised and he looked into the mirror at himself.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “That’s better.”

  With a lethargic movement, he stood up and Joe had to move around the chair to get the towel and the striped cloth off.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, automatically.

  The man started shuffling for the door, his hands still in the side pockets of his coat.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Joe said, a surprised look on his face.

  The man turned slowly and Joe swallowed as the dark-circled eyes looked at him.

  “That’s a buck-fifty,” he said, nervously.

  The man stared at trim with glazed, unblinking eyes.

  “What?” he said.

  “A buck-fifty,” Joe said again. “For the cut.”

  A moment more, the man looked at Joe. Then, slowly, as if he weren’t sure he was looking in the right place, the man looked down at his coat pockets.

  Slowly, jerkingly, he drew out his hands.

  Joe felt himself go rigid. He caught his breath and moved back a step, eyes staring at the man’s white hands, at the nails which grew almost an inch past the finger tips.

  “But I have no money,” the man said as he slowly opened his hands.

  Joe didn’t even hear the gasp that filled this throat.

  He stood there, staring open-mouthed at the black dirt sifting through the man’s white fingers.

  He stood there, paralyzed, until the man had turned and, with a heavy shuffle, walked to the screen door and left the shop.

  Then, he walked numbly to the doorway and out onto the sun-drenched sidewalk.

  He stood there for a long time, blank-faced, watching the man hobble slowly across the street and walk up toward Atlantic Avenue and the bank.

  An Element Never Forgets

  I’m not sure but Leslie J. Boxbishop may have been the greatest physicist that ever lived. I know I will be laughed at for writing this but so was Galileo. I don’t care, Leslie J. Boxbishop may not be with us in the flesh but his great daring lives on and I mean to put his memory right. So here is the story.

  Leslie and I were room mates at Fort College. We were both majoring in physics but if I was a molehill Leslie was a mountain. He never went out with girls like I did and he only went to the movies once in three years to see Madame Curie in a revival because he didn’t believe in radium.

  Leslie preferred to stay in our room reading physics books or experimenting with his apparatus. He had no end of equipment from an Allan wrench to a zymometer. Late at night he would still be up, poring over his papers, pressurizing cylinders, separating gold leaves and similar activities. Leslie was always up and doing.

  All this is to set the stage for Leslie’s great discovery which came like this.

  One night in April we were both in the room and Leslie threw his pencil in the air and shouted,

  “I have got it!”

  I turned to him in surprise.

  “What is it?” I asked, “What have you got?”

  “Raymond,” he said with a fierce light in his eyes, “Raymond, I have just driven the last nail into the coffin!”

  “What coffin, Leslie?” I asked him.

  “The coffin,” he said triumphantly, “In which we shall bury all physics.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked him.

  “Come here,” he said, “And I will tell you. I will do better, I will show you.”

  I put down The Theory of Double Radiometric Isotopes As They Affect Flowers by J. Woodford and walked over to Leslie. He was squatting on a tripod stool before his apparatus bench. Before him was the sheaf of papers he had been working on for the past two years. Whenever I had asked him what was on them he had winked an eye and said his theory. Was he actually going to reveal it to me now?

  “I guess you have been wondering,” he said, “What I have written on all these papers.”

  “Yes,” I admitted, “I have.” Excited at the thought that Leslie was about to share his secret with me.

  “See,” he said, “Read the title.”

  I read,

  THE THEORY OF THE ELEMENTS

  by

  Leslie J. Boxbishop, B.S.

  We were not to graduate for a year and two months yet but I did not cavil about the B.S. I knew he would get one, wild horses couldn’t keep him from it. Leslie was straight A.

  “Elements?” I said, “Like O and H?”

  Leslie pressed his lips together.

  “Nonsense!” he said, “How could that put all physics in its grave?”

  I shrugged and told him I did not know.

  “No,” he said, in a mystic voice, “No, this is far more than that. My ‘Elements’ are far more vital and startling.”

  “What are they?” I asked him.

  “What are they?” he repeated with the glow of discovery on his face, “Such that no physical law can stand by itself a second more!”

  I felt a tremor in my very vitals. Leslie J. Boxbishop, I knew, was not one to make rash claims.

  “But,” I faltered, “But how can this be? What is it you have discovered?”

  “What,” asked Leslie J. Boxbishop of me, “Is one of the very foundations of physical theory?”

  “What?” I said, too excited to equate.

  “The laws of motion,” stated Leslie, “To wit: Every body perseveres in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereupon.”

  He paused for emphasis.

  “Thus,” he said, “The premise that any mass will remain at rest until some external force moves it and that the greater the external force the greater the movement.”

  “Is this…untrue?” I questioned hesitantly.

  “In externals, no!” cried Leslie, “But effect is what we all may see, physicist and plumber alike. It is cause that is the vital factor!”

  “Yes?” My voice failed.

  Leslie J. Boxbishop folded his arms.


  “I, alone, know the true cause,” he said.

  “But what…?”

  “The Elements,” Leslie said simply.

  My hands shook.

  “But what in God’s name are the elements?” I cried.

  “The Elements,” Leslie corrected.

  “The Elements,” I amended.

  “Ah,” beamed Leslie, “That is the question.”

  “The Elements,” said Leslie J. Boxbishop, “are sub-microscopic beings. Invisible to our eye as,” his voice grew harsh, “indeed, are the so-called ‘atoms’ and ‘molecules’.”

  He glared at me, daring me to refute.

  “But, Leslie,” I began.

  “Theories, theories,” he demeaned in angry tones, “I have found The Truth!”

  He paused to fill his lungs with air.

  “To return to the outmoded laws of motion,” he said, “Which treats mass as some pliant, dead lump which sits, waiting patiently, for some external force to come along and prove Newton’s asinine law of inertia.”

  I stared at him.

  “Mass is not dead!” he cried, smoting an outraged fist upon his bench, “Mass is a community of Elements, each physical shape its own…township, as it were.”

  He leaned forward, fire in his words.

  “When force is applied to mass, these Elements, resentful of intrusion on their natural state of comatose reserve-move away! And the faster the external force – the greater the external force – the faster and the greater will be the movement of escape by the Elements!”

  Leslie looked bitter.

  “They do not like our touch,” he said solemnly, “And I, for one, do not blame them.”

  “But Leslie…” I attempted an objection.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “You say these…Elements are…alive?”

  “They are,” he said, “Vitally and functionally alive. As witness their energetic progress in liquid which,” he added scornfully, “That fool Brown credited to the erratic buffeting of molecules instead of correctly ascribing the movement to the Elements enjoying the swim.”

  “But if they are sub-microscopic, Leslie,” I ventured.

  “The moving granules are not the Elements!” Leslie said impatiently, “But merely chaff caught up in the currents created by the swimming Elements!”

  “This is incredible,” I said.

  “Incredible but true,” stated Leslie, “There are no molecules, no atoms, electrons nor protons. There are only the Elements.”

  He paused a second.

  “And now,” he went on, “With this truth as our premise all phenomena become explicable. The increased pressure and heat in a cylinder as the piston is forced down. Not because of concentrated molecular energy but,” he finished, “Because the Elements, infuriated and, singularly claustrophobic struggle the more violently to escape.”

  I gaped at Leslie, unable to speak much less to argue with his astonishing concept.

  “To continue,” Leslie said, “In all phenomena, great or small, my theory is validated. For an example, take gravity.”

  “Yes,” I said, “Gravity.”

  “All this talk of attractive forces is so much anachronistic tush,” said Leslie, “The case itself is simple to obviousness. As indeed are all the true concepts. In short, gravity is no more nor less than the desire of the Elements to have ground beneath them. The fact that all falling objects attain the same rate of speed merely demonstrates that all the Elements, despite differences in attitude and state, have an equal desire for earth’s solidity beneath them.”

  He paused, an ironic twist to his narrow-lipped face.

  “And, if for one moment,” he said, “These minuscules of life decided that they would rather look elsewhere for a home – that, simply, would be the end of gravity.”

  “No!” I cried.

  “Yes!” he cried in answer, “Null-g, then, would only be an interplanetary nomadic urge on the part of the Elements.”

  Silence for a moment as I stared in wonder. Then I said,

  “You say there are differences between Elements?” I asked.

  “Well, of course!” Leslie said, almost indignantly, “Should they be all the same? Should they not be as fully variegated in idea, impulse and philosophy as man himself?”

  “I…”

  “Well, of course,” said Leslie, “Of course. And is there not proof of this truism in physical objectivity? Consider electrostatics, all phenomena of attraction and repulsion. What are they but conclusive evidence that the Elements, like anyone else, also have their likes and their dislikes.”

  He enumerated.

  “One,” he said, “Physical differences. Greater mass in motion ceased said motion sooner than a lesser mass. Why? Because of friction? Balderdash! Because one community of Elements gets tired sooner than another. The larger the community the greater proportion of invalids and young. The larger the increment of fatigue!”

  He held up a second finger.

  “Two: mental differences. Why do some liquids boil before others, some solids melt before others, some gases ignite before others? Difference in temper, no more nor less. Some Elements are more emotionally unstable than others.

  Leslie paused.

  “And here,” he said, “We come to the crux of the matter. Namely, that man does not realize what he is tampering with!”

  He looked grimly at me.

  “These Elements never forget! In most experiments I think that, somehow, these Elements realize they are being preyed upon in ignorance. And not with deliberate intent. However…!”

  Leslie flashed a premonitional eye.

  “We can overdo ourselves,” he said, “As in, for a glaring instance, the atomic bombs.”

  “But how?” I said nervously.

  “What is the atomic bomb?” queried Leslie, “But a mass of tortured Elements suffering complete nervous breakdown?”

  I shuddered. At the thought.

  “The purpose, the goal of my pronouncement on the Elements,” Leslie expounded, “Is a request, nay a plea to cease from this hideous mangling of Elements!”

  He leaned forward.

  “How would you feel?” he asked me, “If some monster entity came along, took your home, melted it to slag and then reformed it into a guided missile?”

  I swallowed.

  “I should not like it,” I said.

  “Much less should they like it!” stormed Leslie, “They who were here long before man crawled out of the mud!”

  Leslie raised a menacing finger.

  “We are in danger,” he said in a hollow, emotion-spent voice, “If we continue making of this world a torture-chamber for the Elements - they will revolt! They do not forget – poor suffering masses…!”

  At that he fell sobbing on his bed.

  I stood there shaken to the core. As his broken sobs scalpeled into my brain I fumbled through his papers, reading from logical beginning to stunning conclusion his theory on the Elements.

  Some day I will make them all known.

  But not now. Tragic entireties dwarf mere details. As tradition-shattering as those details are.

  But I have now to make a terrible revelation. Were I of different caliber I might hide it from the world, preferring rather to let it remember Leslie only as the discoverer of the Elements.

  But I must be frank, as unkind as it may seem. For so confident am I of the lasting import of Leslie’s discovery that mere personality cannot overshadow it.

  That night I tossed fretfully on my pillow unable to sleep, the in- credibleness of Leslie’s discovery mounting in volume until the very idea threatened to engulf me.

  Then morning came somehow and I left Leslie sleeping the sleep of exhaustion. I went to class and spent a restless morning listening to lectures, the content of which remains lost to me to this day.

  Then, at noon I returned to our room.

  To find poor Leslie – dead.

  The cause seemed simple, though horrifying enough.
Leslie, never the practical thinker, had heated a can of beans without punching air holes. Death from shrapnel had been merciless.

  But that is not the end. How shall I tell it? It tears my heart out yet to reveal the truth.

  The truth which I found in the last page of his experiments on the Elements. I quote it verbatim, awful as it is.

  I sit here dying. My life ebbs away quickly. I must make this confession. I have fought the horrible realization but I know, at last, that it is too true.

  I did it deliberately. I heated the Elements in the can until, driven mad by fear and pain, they combusted and…it is just…killed me.

  I am dying. Forgive me, Elements, I have no right to live.

  I know you will never forget.