Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Thank you, Peter,” David whispered.

  Peter was again on the sofa, perched forward on the very edge of it, while David slumped back beside him. Peter took David’s hand and squeezed it, and then said to the group, “We had these two formulae.”

   

  * * *

   

  It was a thirty-gear bike, a virtual thesaurus entry of power and speed, adaptable to any terrain known to man; there was probably a gear for going across ceilings. Once Freddie’d figured out how to sit on the thing without pain or damage, it fairly flew along the verge.

  These were country roads, and not heavily trafficked, but some vehicles used them. On an average of once every two minutes or so, a car, or more often a pickup truck, would come along, in one direction or the other, and the first few times Freddie tensed up a lot, waiting for who knew what to happen. After all, the people in those vehicles would be seeing a bicycle travel along beside the road all by itself, at a pretty good clip. The bicycle was on the right side, to go with the flow of traffic, but that was all that was even remotely right about it. (The sandwich sludge, growing fainter, was a minor element in the scene.)

  So he’d expected cars to slam to a stop. He’d expected part of this exercise would be him from time to time racing away into the woods, or into the forehead-high cornfields, or otherwise eluding pursuers, before being allowed to proceed peacefully on his way. But in the first ten minutes of his journey half a dozen cars and trucks went on by, north- or south-bound, and nobody at all stopped, though he did see some surprised faces in passenger windows, and a couple of times he saw brake lights briefly flick on. But then every car or pickup continued on its way, some even faster than before.

  Maybe country people, Freddie thought, are calmer than city people. Maybe they take odd things in stride, since living in the country is already such an odd thing to do. Maybe they figured it was a remote-control robot bicycle, like the remote-control robot airplanes that go sputter-sputter-sputter over every park in America in the summer, when you’re trying to relax, or like those remote-control robot automobiles people give their kids at Christmas and the first thing the kid does is drive it into the tree and knock the tree over. Or maybe they were just people who mind their own business.

  Well, no. Up ahead, the road dipped down, and then dipped up again, and then way up there it went around a curve. And that was where, headed this way, the police car appeared, coming around that curve, some kind of dark-colored state police car. No siren or lights or anything, but moving fast.

  Somebody’d made a phone call.

  To Freddie’s right was a cornfield, the corn about five feet tall. The state-police car disappeared into the dip. Freddie turned right, and pedaled into the cornfield, as the state-police car reappeared, much closer.

  They’d seen him, dammit; he heard them squeal to a stop. Sounds of car doors opening and closing. They couldn’t see the bicycle, because it was shorter than the corn. And they couldn’t see Freddie because they couldn’t see Freddie. But Freddie could see them, two state troopers in uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats, conferring briefly beside their car.

  Freddie, having driven fifteen or twenty feet into the cornfield, had turned left, and was now going between the rows, parallel to the road. There was almost room enough between the lines of corn plants for the bicycle, particularly if he held on to the handlebar in from the outer edge grips. The ground in here was hard as a rock, pretty smooth, and weedless; these are not organic farmers, you know.

  Freddie worked his way through the gears until he found the one for cornfields, and then legged it, occasionally looking back toward the cops. They had apparently spotted his wheel tracks where he’d crossed the scrubland into the field, but once inside he’d left very little spoor on this hard dry soil; certainly not enough for anybody to track him. They were now moving around aimlessly back there, looking down.

  What would the cops do next? They must have received more than one report about a bicycle traveling all on its own, because one report they would have figured was a nut. These two officers had been sent out to check into it. They’d seen the bicycle, or they’d seen something, far away and indistinct, and they’d seen it go into the cornfield. Now they’d look around in here for a while, and then they’d radio in that they thought they’d seen it but had lost it, and they’d be told there’s no point hanging around, let’s see if there’s any more reports, and in any case a bicycle riding by itself doesn’t actually break any man-made laws, only natural ones. So they’d go away.

  That was Freddie’s theory, anyway, and he liked it. What he didn’t like was that, as he moved into the dip in the land, he saw that just ahead the cornfield gave way to pasture with cows in it, surrounded by barbed-wire fence.

  There was nothing for it but to turn left and go back out to County Route 14. He was in the dip now, and the state-police car was out of sight. May it stay out of sight. Freddie coasted to the bottom of the dip, switched to the climbing-out-of-a-dip gear, and sped on.

  There was no rearview mirror on this thing, unfortunately. Freddie had to keep looking back over his shoulder. Up to the top of the dip, and he saw way behind himself to the police car still stopped beside the cornfield. Around the curve he went, shifted into the good-level-road gear, and hit forty-five without working up a sweat.

   

  * * *

   

  Robert said, “Peter, if I didn’t know you have no sense of humor—”

  “Well, thank you very much.”

  “You’re welcome. And if I hadn’t seen those two ghostly cats of yours with my very own eyes, I would think, when you tell me an invisible man is on his way here to this house from the city, that you were pulling my leg.”

  David said, “Robert, I would give my leg for this not to be true.”

  One of the four who had just heard the whole story for the first time, a talent agent named Gerald, said, “Peter, what I still don’t understand is, if you never considered using these potions togeth—”

  “Formulae.”

  Gerald smirked a bit, but nodded. “Whatever you say, dear. If you never put these things together on purpose, in your lab, how can you be so sure what their combined effect might be?”

  “Computer models,” David answered.

  “Also, I’m afraid, empirically,” Peter said, and looked mournful. “On the phone just now, Freddie asked me when the invisibility would fade off and he’d get to be visible again.”

  David made a low moaning sound. “Lunch,” said the canapé waiter.

  Martin got to his feet. “We have an hour and a half, at the very least, before this fellow gets here. We’ll have our lunch, and then we’ll decide what to do.”

  “I know what to do, Peter said, also standing. “Once we’ve got our hands on Freddie, I want to keep him. Not lose him stupidly, the way we did last time.”

  “And not,” David added, “turn him over to those awful tobacco people.”

  “Nor,” Peter said, “that even worse policeman.”

  “Oh!” David cried, at the very memory of Barney Beuler. “Certainly not!”

  “We’ll capture him,” Robert decided. “Thirteen of us, one of him. I don’t care how invisible he is, or how clever, we can surround him and capture him and tie him to a piece of furniture if we have to.”

  “A large piece of furniture,” Peter advised.

  “First,” Martin said, “lunch.”

   

  * * *

   

  The car that squealed to a stop in the middle of the road was full of drunken teenage boys. It came down Route 14 from the north, weaving back and forth in the road ahead of Freddie, polluting the air with terrible rap noises, and then it stopped so suddenly its front bumper kissed the blacktop, and five teenagers piled out of it, leaving the doors open and the rap snarling as they ran with drunken intensity straight at Freddie. That is, at the bicycle rolling along all by itself at the edge of the road. />
  Damn, damn, double damn. By Freddie’s calculations, Quarantine Road would be just a little beyond that next curve up there; he was almost to it. But these drunken clowns were too close and coming too fast for Freddie to take any evasive action, even if he’d had a friendly cornfield beside him instead of these hilly, rocky, underbrush-clogged woods. No time to swing around and head the other way, and no profit in it, either, since they could always catch up with him in their car, and probably run him down with it, too.

  Freddie jumped off the bike and gave it a shove toward the woods. It was still rolling, though with a distinct wobble, when the first of the drunken louts reached it, and launched himself through the air and tackled it, which must have hurt.

  Freddie was already through them, running toward their car, the blacktop hot beneath his bare feet. The car was an old Ford LTD that had apparently been used as a stable for several years. The driver had not only left the rap crap blasting and the key in its ignition, he’d left the engine running as well, merely shifting into “park” before he’d leaped out in pursuit of the bike. Sliding behind the fuzzy-cloth-covered wheel with its eight-ball speed-turner mounted on it, feeling his body immediately stick to the vinyl fake-zebra seat cover, Freddie grabbed the eight-ball-topped gearshift with one hand while slamming the driver’s door with the other, shifted into “drive,” and drove.

  The assembled meatheads looked up from dismembering the bicycle to see their former chariot execute a fast hard K-turn, its other doors slamming as the LTD shot forward, its wheels smoking as it reversed, and the whole car bouncing like something in a demolition derby when it slashed away, northbound.

  How they yowled! Like hyenas disturbed over carrion. Freddie couldn’t hear them, because he was leaving so fast and also because he couldn’t figure out at first how to stop that strident yawp out of the LTD’s oversize speakers. Then he was around the far curve, the throwbacks were out of sight, and he slowed down long enough to discover the racket didn’t come from a radio station but a tape. He ejected the tape from the player, and then from the car.

  Quarantine Road. Freddie made the turn, and on this narrow dirt road there was no other traffic at all. If he’d only made it this far on the bike, he’d have been absolutely safe.

  On the other hand, this LTD was faster, if grubbier. Freddie drove along, and in no time at all he passed the archway with the double S’s. A blacktop road went in under it, but no structures could be seen from here in those woods.

  Freddie kept going, and a quarter mile later he found a weedy dirt track that wandered away to the right. He drove in there, went far enough to be invisible from Quarantine Road, turned off into the scrubby woods, and kept going until the bottom was torn out by a rock. That seemed far enough.

   

  * * *

   

  Most people wanted to talk about the invisible man during lunch, but Martin would have none of it. “Our digestions come first,” he said. “We can wait, and take our time, and have a nice lunch, and then, over coffee afterward, we can discuss exactly what to do about Peter and David’s invisible man.”

  Of course Nurse Martin was, as usual, right. So everybody thought about the invisible man, but spoke, if they spoke at all, disjointedly about other things that didn’t matter a bit.

  At last lunch was finished, coffee was served, and the plates and staff were removed to the kitchen. Robert said, “Now, does anyone have anything they’ve been dying to say?”

  A clamor of voices arose, but through them drove the Kissingeresque basso of Edmond, a corporate attorney in his other life, who said, “I would like to say a word about kidnapping.”

  That shut everybody up. They all stared at Edmond, a bearlike man famous in his group for having more hair on his shoulders than on his head. At last, William, an antiques dealer, said, “Edmond, this isn’t kidnapping. This is an invisible man!”

  Edmond spread his meaty hands. “Hath an invisible man no rights? Hath he not hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, even if you can’t see them? If you prick him, doth he not bleed?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” said Peter.

  Edmond said, “I just think you should consider the ramifications, from a legal point of view, before you proceed.”

  “Fine,” David said. “Then we’ll proceed.”

  “And it isn’t kidnapping,” Peter insisted. “We had an agreement with the man.”

  “Which he abrogated,” Edmond said, “when he left your house.”

  “And which he reinstated,” Peter said, “when he phoned me. He phoned me, Edmond, not—”

  “Us,” said David.

  “Exactly,” Peter said. “He phoned us, he asked for either of us, so he was returning to the original agreement, and in fact he said so on the phone, offered to go on with the observation pattern we’d agreed to in the first place.”

  “An interesting question,” Edmond said. “Unlikely, I suppose, to go to court.”

  “Freddie is very likely to wind up in court,” Peter said, “but hardly as the plaintiff.”

  Robert said, “I know we have an hour, or more than an hour, but let’s figure out now what we’re going to do when he gets here.”

  “How will we know when he’s here?” asked Curtis, a set designer. “I mean, if we can’t see him.”

  David said, “I suppose he must have some sort of car, to come all the way up from the city.”

  “That should be something to see,” Daniel, an architect, said. “An empty car, speeding along the highway.”

  David said, “Maybe he has a friend who can drive him,” and Peter said, “Or possibly he wraps his head in bandages like Claude Rains in that movie.”

  “That would be spooky,” Curtis said.

  Robert said, “All right, he gets here, we see his car or he rings the bell or whatever. Peter and David, you two discuss the situation with him, see if you can persuade him to cooperate, but if it becomes clear he isn’t going to cooperate, we ought to have a plan.”

  Martin said, “Here’s what we’ll do. Peter, if you decide he’s planning to give you the slip again, say, ‘Harvey,’ as though that were somebody’s name here—”

  Peter said, “Why Harvey?”

  “Because that was the six-foot invisible rabbit in the play of the same name,” Martin said. “Don’t worry about it, Peter, just say ‘Harvey’ if you think we have to hold the fellow here against his will. Then we’ll all jump up and block the exits, and imprison him in this room.”

  “I’m not very happy about that idea,” Edmond said.

  “But you’ll go along with it,” Robert told him.

  Edmond shrugged those hairy shoulders. “If I must. But, Peter, if you can get his willing agreement to stay, that would be so much better than using restraint.”

  “We had his agreement last time,” Peter pointed out, “and we saw what it was worth.”

  “Besides,” David said, “when he finds out, you know, he’s going to be mad at us.”

  “I’m afraid he is,” Peter agreed.

  “He’s likely to go away,” David said, “just out of spite, and then that awful policeman will get him.”

  “Or the tobacco-company people,” Peter said.

  “When he finds out what?”

  “That it’s permanent, of course,” Peter said, then looked up and frowned at everybody, to see them all frowning at him. “Who said that?” he asked.

  They all went on looking at him.

  “It’s permanent?”

  “Oh, my God,” David whispered. “He’s here.”

  “Impossible!” Peter cried.

  “Peter,” David whispered. “Can he fly?”

  “I’m never gonna get myself back?”

  All the faces in the room were now ashen. Hair stood up on the backs of necks, throats grew dry, eyes grew wide. Everybody stared all around, even though everybody knew there would be nothing to see.

  Martin leaned toward Peter. “Speak to him,�
�� he whispered.

  Those first two shouts had seemed to come from over by the fireplace, but the next one sounded from the vicinity of the hall doorway: “You dirty bastards! You can’t bring me back!”

  Everyone was afraid to move. With nothing else to gape at, they gaped at Peter and David. Turning to gape toward the doorway, Peter said, “You shouldn’t have taken the other formula, Freddie. You should have been honest with us, and none of—”

  “What other formula?” The loud angry voice came now from near the front windows. “I didn’t take any formula! All I took was that goddam useless antidote!”

  “There is no antidote!”

  “Now you tell me? You said it was the antidote!”

  “I’m sorry, Freddie,” David said, and Peter said, “We did lie to you, we’re both sorry, but we had no idea you’d be in a position to take that other formula.”

  “You said it was the antidote.”

  “To calm you down,” David said, and Peter said, “You said it first, remember? It was your idea. ‘Oh, yeah, the formula’s the shot and the antidote’s the thing you swallow.’ Remember?”

  “You lied to me.”

  “We were wrong to do that, Freddie,” Peter agreed, “but you were wrong, too. You promised you’d stay, and you didn’t stay.”

  “So what was that other thing, if it wasn’t the antidote?”

  “We had two formulae,” Peter said, and David said, “You took them both,” and Peter said, “If you’d just taken the one, none of this would have happened,” and David said, “You’d be your old self now.”

  “I can’t believe it,” the bodiless voice said. It seemed to be moving steadily around the room, like a lion in a cage. “My girlfriend’s leaving me because it’s driving her nuts I’m like this, and now I have to tell her I’m always gonna be like this?”

  “I imagine,” said the other William, the screenwriter, “sex is rather odd, the way you are now.” He managed to sound at the same time both sympathetic and prurient.

  “We keep the lights out.”

  “Oral, in particular,” the other William mused.

  Peter said, “Freddie, if you’ll come back to the lab with us, we’ll work on it, I swear we’ll work on it day and night. We’ll devote our entire lab time to finding an antidote. I’m sure, if you’ll just give us some time—”