Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  And now, when he’d told them the reason for his presence! He and his masters wanted Peter and David to make them another invisible man! Out of the question!

  Peter said, “Don’t you think enough trouble has been—”

  “Excuse me,” Leethe interrupted, stopping traffic with one raised palm. “I don’t believe you’re thinking this through as clearly as you might. We are talking here about volunteers, about the very experiment you were already undertaking, about—” He broke off and looked around. Almost plaintively, he said, “Couldn’t we sit comfortably somewhere? In that nice lounge room upstairs?”

  “We don’t want you here at all,” David said, but Peter had been listening more closely to Leethe’s words, and so he asked, “What do you mean, volunteers?”

  “I mean,” Leethe said, “you needn’t hold anyone at gunpoint.”

  Oh, dear, Shanana hadn’t known about that. Her eyes were widening, weren’t they? Yes, and her ears, too, no doubt. Peter said, “We can spare you five minutes. Come to the conference room.”

  “Oh, well,” Leethe said, looking sad. “Mayn’t I be permitted to sit in the nice lounge? Mr. Cummingford isn’t present.”

  They both blinked at him. Peter said, “Did you say ‘mayn’t I’?”

  Apparently surprised, touching his chin with a fingertip as though to identify himself for the onlookers, Leethe said, “So I did. Doesn’t that mean I deserve the nice lounge?”

  “Oh, very well,” Peter said, rolling his eyes in David’s direction. “Come along.”

  They went upstairs, and sat on the sofas the same way they had two weeks ago when Leethe had shown them Freddie Noon’s police pictures. This time, no one offered the man refreshments; instead, Peter said, “Maybe you’d better explain this proposal.”

  “Certainly. You have two experimental medicines—”

  “Formulae,” Peter interrupted. “Not medicines, because untried.”

  “Very well, formulae. You had hoped that one or the other would help in the struggle against melanoma, but now you know that the two in combination create invisibility. You have in your possession an invisibility formula.”

  David said, “Peter, that’s right! I never even thought about that.” His mind had been too full of the other ramifications of the problem.

  Peter was less thrilled. He said, “Go on, Mr. Leethe.”

  “NAABOR, for its own purposes, would like to employ the services of an invisible person,” Leethe went on. “You, for your purposes, would like volunteers upon which to test your med—formulae. NAABOR is prepared to present you with two volunteers at this time, to be made invisible. As an inducement, NAABOR will undertake, in the near future, to provide you as many volunteers as you require for more normal study.”

  David, all agog, said, “Peter, do you think—?” But Peter was saying to Leethe, “What’s the catch?”

  “Catch?” Leethe smacked his right fist into a catcher’s mitt, then tossed the ball into the dugout. “What catch can there possibly be? NAABOR will supply the volunteers, both now and for later, with all releases signed. You can observe your new guinea pigs, if you can be said to observe an invisible—”

  “For how long?” Peter asked.

  Leethe showed how long the fish was he’d almost caught. “How long do you want?”

  “A week.”

  “Oh, come,” Leethe said, reducing the fish to a minnow. “You were only hoping for twenty-four hours with the first one.”

  “The circumstances were different.”

  “We have a time consideration, on our side,” Leethe admitted. “We could agree to forty-eight hours.”

  Peter considered that, then nodded. “Acceptable,” he said, then added, “We’ll want a contract,” and David looked stern and said, “That’s right!”

  “Of course,” Leethe said.

  “Prepared by Bradley Cummingford.”

  “Less work for me,” Leethe said. “Why not phone him right now? The sooner we get the paperwork out of the way, the sooner we can get started, and the sooner we’ll see some results.” He smiled at himself. “Or not,” he appended. “As the case may be.”

  34

  It was Tuesday morning when Mordon Leethe put in his request for more invisibles; the rest of Tuesday, how those phones and faxes flew. Documents were drawn up, sent, revised, sent, argued over, sent, signed, and sent. Meanwhile, the vast machinery of NAABOR was grinding through who knew what contortions to select, approve, and induce the two volunteers. At last, at ten minutes past six that evening, in the lab, long after Shanana had left for the day and Bradley’s last contractual nit had been picked, David put down a retort and answered the telephone himself, to hear someone say, “This is Ms. Clarkson from Personnel, wishing to speak to either—”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “—Dr. Loo—I say, this is Ms. Clarkson from Personnel, and I wish to speak—”

  “What personnel? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Is this the Loomis—”

  “Heimhocker, yes.”

  “I’d like to speak to—”

  “This is Dr. Loomis.”

  “—either Doctor Loo—oh. You’re Dr. Loomis.”

  “I know who I am,” David said. “Who are you?”

  “Ms. Clarkson of Personnel, as I believe I said before.”

  From across the lab, Peter said, “Who is it, David?”

  “I’m trying to find out,” David told him, and into the phone he said, “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What is personnel?”

  “The department I’m in!”

  “Department? Macy’s?” Away from the phone: “Peter? Did we order anything from Macy’s?”

  “The department of NAABOR!” screamed the woman.

  “I don’t think so,” Peter said.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” David told the phone. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I thought I had.” The woman seemed to be panting now.

  “Well, you didn’t,” David said.

  There was a little silence down the phone line then, which David didn’t intrude on, having nothing to say—she was the one who’d made the call, after all—and then, in a much more controlled manner, she said, “May I speak to Dr. Heimhocker, please.”

  “Of course,” David said, and held the phone out toward Peter, saying, “It’s for you.”

  Peter approached, hand out. “Who is it?”

  “Somebody from NAABOR. It’s you she wants to talk to.”

  “Huh.” Peter took the phone, spoke briefly into it, wrote a couple of things on the pad near the phone, then said, “Fine. Thank you very much. Good-bye,” and hung up.

  David said, “What was that all about?”

  “Our volunteers. They’ll be here at nine tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, the volunteers!” David clapped his hands. “Peter, it’s actually going to happen!”

  “It would seem so.”

  David gave him a look. “Peter,” he said, “I know we’re both being calm and collected about all this, but in fact, it is very exciting.”

  “I suppose it is,” Peter said. “And especially for”—he added, looking at the names he’d written on the pad—“Michael Prendergast and George Clapp.”

   

  * * *

   

  George Clapp was black, but that wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was that Michael Prendergast was a woman. And a beautiful woman at that, astonishingly beautiful in her flowered summer dress, a tanned and healthy blonde of about twenty-five, the Playmate of the decade, with bright blue eyes and delicious cheekbones and a body as strokable as a kitten’s.

  George Clapp on the other hand was probably forty years of age and barely five feet tall. A skinny gnarly sort of guy, he wore a shiny black suit, thin black tie, white shirt, and big black river-barge shoes. His skin was a dull brown. Two thick ropes of old scar tissue angled across his face, from just under his right eye down his right cheek,
across his chin and on down to the side of his neck under his left ear.

  Beforehand, Peter and David had decided to speed the process by each doing the preliminary interview with one subject. Peter had drawn Michael, so he took her up to the sitting room that Mordon Leethe craved so much. As they sat facing one another on the sofas there, Peter took her through her medical history, and he simply couldn’t find anything wrong. Not a junkie, no history of mental problems, no serious or chronic illnesses. Married twice, divorced twice, never pregnant. Healthy siblings, healthy parents, healthy grandparents. Finishing, Peter said, “This is not a question on the form, but I feel I have to ask it, anyway.”

  “Why, you mean,” she said.

  “Yes. You do understand what the idea is here, don’t you?”

  “Perfectly,” she said. “I am a willing volunteer in a medical experiment, at the end of which I either will or will not be invisible.” She smiled briefly, a dazzling sight. “My guess is that I will not be,” she said, “but I don’t want to spoil anybody’s fun.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The corporation I work for is paying me a great deal of money over my remaining lifetime, no matter what happens with the experiment. If it turns out I am invisible, they’ll have other well-paying uses for me.”

  “So you’re doing it for money,” Peter said. He felt vaguely disappointed.

  “Not entirely,” she said. “Dr. Heimhocker, would you say I’m attractive?”

  “Anybody would say you’re attractive,” Peter told her. “You’re probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been in the same room with. You understand you aren’t my type—”

  She smiled, and nodded.

  “—but I certainly recognize beauty when I see it. Which is really why I’m asking the question. Why risk what—why risk anything?”

  “Doctor,” she said, “I am a nuclear physicist and a theoretical mathematician. I was third in my class at MIT, but when I left school I simply could not find a job to match my capabilities. My record was enough to get me many interviews, but that was always the end of it. Women hate me. Men find it impossible to think when I’m around. Today I am a drudge in the statistical section of the American Tobacco Research Institute, bending the cancer numbers. It’s the equivalent of you being a janitor in a hospital.”

  “Surely,” Peter said, “it can’t be—”

  “As bad as that? Which of us is living my life, Doctor?”

  “You are,” Peter said.

  “Nobody has ever seen me,” she said. “Seen me. Neither of my husbands ever saw me; they both felt cheated whenever that trophy on the shelf acted as though it were an actual living creature. The last time my looks gave me pleasure I was probably nine years old. I can’t scar myself deliberately, that would be stupid. But this? Why not? No one can see me anyway, so why not be invisible? Make the rest of my life a phone-in? With pleasure.” That dazzling smile had something too shiny in it. “Let’s hope your invention is a success, Dr. Heimhocker,” she said.

   

  * * *

   

  Meantime, in the conference room downstairs, David was having a very different conversation with George Clapp, who didn’t so much have a medical history as a medical anthology. He had been shot, he had been stabbed, many of his bones had been broken in accidents and fights. He had been an alcoholic and drug addict, but had been clean—he swore—for six years. “After thirty-five, man,” he said, “either it’s killed you, or you get tired of it. I got tired of it.”

  “Any diseases?” David asked.

  “Name it,” George said.

  David did, and George had at one time or another suffered from just about every nonfatal disease known to man, but was now passably healthy. He was a chauffeur with NAABOR, had been for the last four years, and when David asked him what had decided him to volunteer for this experiment George said, “This just between us?”

  “Oh, of course,” David said, and put down his pen.

  “Couple states, they still got paper out on me,” George explained. “Texas and Florida, you know, they’re these death-penalty places, they like to kill people. Now, I’m not saying I done what they say, but the way I look at it, we leave them there sleeping dogs lie, we ain’t gonna get bit. You see what I mean?”

  “I think so,” David said.

  “All the time, these days,” George said, “I’m kinda scared. I figure, some cop gonna pull me over, when I’m chauffeurin, you know, they run the computer on me, bang, my ass is in the southland. This way, if what you’re gonna do works out, I’m home and dry. They can’t fry what they can’t see, am I right?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you are,” David said.

  “And if it don’t work, what you’re doin here,” George said, and spread his hands, his big smile making that awful scar writhe like a brown snake across his face, “they still gonna pay me so much money I don’t ever hafta work again unless I don’t want to. A cop that can’t see me can’t compute me, don’t that make sense?”

  David worked his way through the negatives, and finally nodded. “I believe it does,” he said.

  35

  “Forty-eight hours exactly,” Mordon said on Friday morning, when the doctors emerged from their elevator and came forward to meet him once again in their front hall. “I’m here to see your results. Or should I say, not see them?”

  “No, you’ll see them, all right,” Heimhocker said.

  Now Mordon looked more closely at the doctors, and realized they were not at all cheerful. They did not look like men who’d just had a triumph. They looked, in fact, quite glum. Shaking his head, thinking already how unpleasant it would be to bring bad news to Jack the Fourth, Mordon said, “You failed?”

  “They aren’t invisible,” Heimhocker said, and Loomis, extremely defensive, said, “Which doesn’t mean we failed. The experiment had too many variables.”

  “Exactly,” Heimhocker said. “Without Freddie Noon, without knowing exactly when he took the second formula, what else he ate or drank that night, what he did the rest of the night, there’s no possible way to duplicate the experiment, and therefore no possible way to duplicate the results.”

  “If that’s the case,” Mordon said, opening a combination lock, “why didn’t you mention it before?”

  “We didn’t know it before, obviously,” Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, “It was worth the effort, we’ve certainly learned from the experience. We now know, for instance, that we do not have a guaranteed invisibility formula.”

  “This is very bad news,” Mordon said, wringing a washcloth. “Where are the volunteers?”

  “In the conference room,” Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, “Did you want to see them?”

  Mordon had met the two volunteers briefly Tuesday afternoon, while the details were being worked out. Did he want to see them again? He wasn’t sure. His hands fluttered by a buddleia bush, looking for pollen, and he said, “What do they look like now? Did it do nothing at all? Or do they look like the cats?”

  “Not a bit like the cats,” Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, “Nor like one another. Until we can study Freddie Noon, the only thing we can say is that the combination of formulae is both volatile and unpredictable.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Mordon said. “Are they likely to sue?”

  “I doubt it,” Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, “Come see for yourself.”

  “Perhaps I’d better.”

  Mordon followed the two doctors back to the conference room, that unlovely fluorescent-lit space, where a tan man in a blue bathrobe sat playing solitaire. He looked up when they entered, smiled at the doctors, then looked at Mordon and said, “You’re one of the lawyers. I remember you.”

  Mordon approached him. “Well, I don’t remember you,” he said. This was hardly the George Clapp he’d met three days ago in NAABOR’s corporate offices in the World Trade Center. This fellow was several shades lighter and several years younger. And—good God. Mordon said, �
��Where’s the scar?”

  “Gone,” George Clapp said, and grinned. “All my scars went away, all over my body. Aches and pains gone. I feel like I’m nineteen years old.”

  Mordon turned wide-eyed to the doctors, and Loomis said, “It ate the scar tissue everywhere on his body.”

  Heimhocker said, “Fasting will do this, too, over a long term. When the body has nothing else to eat, it will eat its own dead tissue. But I’ve never heard of it happening this fast.”

  Clapp put down the deck of cards, lifted his hands palm out, grinned all over his face, and said, “Tell him about my prints.”

  “Yes, his fingerprints,” Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, “We put their fingerprints on their medical sheets,” and Heimhocker said, “George’s have changed,” and Loomis said, “They’re much simpler and fainter than they were. Not at all the same.”

  “Run that computer on me,” Clapp said, and laughed.

  Mordon said, “And the woman? Miss Prendergast? Did it do the same to her?”

  “Not exactly,” Heimhocker said, and Loomis said to Clapp, “Where is she, anyway?”

  “Went to the ladies’. She’ll be back.”

  Heimhocker said to Mordon, “Her fingerprints didn’t change. As I say, this formula is so unknown, we’re not sure what it will do.”

  “Not without Freddie Noon,” Mordon said. “I take the point.”

  “Precisely,” Heimhocker said, and movement behind Mordon made him turn around.

  Michael Prendergast had come in. Mordon stared at her. “Oh, my God,” he breathed. His hands didn’t move.

  She was no longer the lushly healthy California-style beauty Mordon had met on Tuesday. Her skin was pale and pink now, almost translucent. A kind of ethereal glow surrounded her, as though she were an angel, or one of the lost maidens mourned by Poe. She looked fragile, unworldly, uncarnal, and absolutely stunning. She was ten times the beauty she had been before.

  “Ms. Prendergast,” Mordon stammered, poleaxed. “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life!”

  She burst into tears.

  36