They played games, writing games, for they communicated by writing. She would scribble a line, then hold the paper up in the air whence he would cause it to vanish into his sphere. He would return it in half a minute, or half a second by her time, with his retort. He had the advantage of her in time with greatly more opportunity to think up responses, but she had the advantage over him in natural wit and was hard to top.
They also played checkers, and he often had to retire apart and read a chapter of a book on the art between moves, and even so she often beat him; for native talent is likely to be a match for accumulated lore and codified procedure.
But to Milly also he was unfaithful in his fashion, being now interested (he no longer became enamored or entranced) in a Mrs. Roberts, a great-grandmother who was his elder by at least fifty years. He had read all the data extant on the attraction of the old for the young, but he still could not explain his successive attachments. He decided that these three examples were enough to establish a universal law: that a woman is simply not afraid of a ghost, though he touches her and is invisible, and writes her notes without hands. It is possible that amorous spirits have known this for a long time, but Charles Vincent had made the discovery himself independently.
When enough knowledge is accumulated on any subject, the pattern will sometimes emerge suddenly, like a form in a picture revealed where before it was not seen. And when enough knowledge is accumulated on all subjects, is there not a chance that a pattern governing all subjects will emerge?
Charles Vincent was caught up in one last enthusiasm. On a long vigil, as he consulted source after source and sorted them in his mind, it seemed that the pattern was coming out clearly and simply, for all its amazing complexity of detail.
“I know everything that they know in the pit, and I know a secret that they do not know. I have not lost the race—I have won it. I can defeat them at the point where they believe themselves invulnerable. If controlled hereafter, we need at least not be controlled by them. It is all falling together now. I have found the final truth, and it is they who have lost the race. I hold the key. I will now be able to enjoy the advantage without paying the ultimate price of defeat and destruction, or of collaboration with them.
“Now I have only to implement my knowledge, to publish the fact, and one shadow at least will be lifted from mankind. I will do it at once. Well, nearly at once. It is almost dawn in the normal world. I will sit here a very little while and rest. Then I will go out and begin to make contact with the proper persons for the disposition of this thing. But first I will sit here a little while and rest.”
And he died quietly in his chair as he sat there.
Dr. Mason made an entry in his private journal: “Charles Vincent, a completely authenticated case of premature aging, one of the most clear-cut in all gerontology. This man was known to me for years, and I here aver that as of one year ago he was of normal appearance and physical state, and that his chronology is also correct, I having also known his father. I examined the subject during the period of his illness, and there is no question at all of his identity, which has also been established for the record by fingerprinting and other means. I aver that Charles Vincent at the age of thirty is dead of old age, having the appearance and organic condition of a man of ninety.”
Then the doctor began to make another note: “As in two other cases of my own observation, the illness was accompanied by a certain delusion and series of dreams, so nearly identical in the three men as to be almost unbelievable. And for the record, and no doubt to the prejudice of my own reputation, I will set down the report of them here.”
But when Dr. Mason had written that, he thought about it for a while.
“No, I will do no such thing,” he said, and he struck out the last lines he had written. “It is best to let sleeping dragons lie.”
And somewhere the faceless men with the smell of the pit on them smiled to themselves in quiet irony.
TRY TO REMEMBER
Originally published in Collage Magazine, December 1960/January 1961.
1.
It isn’t that professors are absent-minded. That is a canard, a joke thought up by somebody who should have been better employed. The fact is that sometimes professors have great presence of mind; they have to have. The fact is that professors are (or should be) very busy and thoughtful men, and that they are forced in the interests of time and efficiency to relegate the unessentials to the background.
Professor—what was that blamed name again?—well anyway, he had done so, he had swept all the unessentials quite out of the way. He carried a small black book prepared by his wife (it must have been his wife) in which all the unessential details of his regime were written down for his guidance and to save him time. On the cover were the words “Try to Remember,” and inside was information copious and handy.
He picked it up now, from the table in front of him, and opened it.
“You are professor J. F. E. Diller,” he read. “The J is for John. There is no use in burdening your mind with the meaning of the other two initials. You are known to your students as Killer Diller for no good reason beyond euphony, and you are called by me “Moxie” for my own reasons.
“You teach Middle Mayan Archeology. Please don’t try to teach anything else. You don’t know anything else. Your schedule is as follows:— But before you examine it, always look at your watch. It shows both the day of the week and the time of the day. It is on your left wrist. The best way I can tell you which is your left wrist is to say that it is the one that your watch is on.”
And there followed the schedule with times and classes and building and room number, and indications as to whether the class was elementary or middle or advanced, and which text was used, Boch, or Mendoza y Carriba, or Strohspalter. And below the class schedule were other varied notes.
“You like every kind of meat except liver. Don’t order it. You think you like it but you don’t. You are always fearfully disappointed when you try to eat it. Eat anything else; you fortunately do not have to watch your calories. You drink Cuba Libres. Never take more than four drinks at one session, they make you so nutty. There is a little drink-counter in your left-hand pants pocket that I made for you. Flip it every time that you have a drink. When you have had four, it will not flip again; so come on home. The best way I can tell you which is your left-hand pants pocket is that it is the one your drink-counter is in.”
There was much more. The professor looked at his watch, looked at his schedule, saw that he still had a little time before his final class, glanced at the final entry in the book, “I love you, Emily,” smiled, closed the small notebook, and put it in his pocket.
“Women have a satirical turn of mind,” he said to his companion.
“What? Are you sure?” the companion asked. “Blenheim denies it, and the evidence in Creager is doubtful. And Pfirschbaum in his monumental monogram ‘Satire und Geschlecht’ has gone into the problem rather more thoroughly than most, and he is not of your opinion. And we have here on our own campus a fellow, Kearney, who is widely read in the field. If you have independent new evidence, you might go to him with it. He will appreciate it.”
“No. I am sorry. I phrased myself badly. I should have said that my own wife, in a particular instance that has just come to my hand, shows flashes of satire. I realize the dangers of generalizing. As to making a statement about the mind of women generally, that is beyond my scope.”
His next class by the schedule, and the final one of the day, was an elementary one in Middle Mayan Archeology, and the text, of course, was that of Boch. But the professor seldom stayed with the text long. He would ask the place of a student, read a paragraph or two out loud, and then begin to talk. Talking was one of the things he did best. He had humor and verve, and the students always liked him. And, if a man knows his subject (Did he know his subject? What an odd question
! How could he be a professor if he didn’t know his subject?), if a man knows his subject thoroughly, then he can afford to handle it lightly, and to toy, to elucidate, to digress.
So the hour went easily and pleasantly. Yet an odd thought began to crawl like a bug up his back, and it unsettled him. “I have been talking total nonsense,” said the thought. “Now why would I be talking nonsense when I am competent and know my subject?”
And the thought slept, but did not die, when after class was over he went to the Scatterbrain Lounge to drink.
“Cuba Libre,” he ordered confidently.
“Are you sure?” asked the girl.
It was only a split second to flip open the small pocket notebook. He had done it many times and was adept at it.
“That is correct,” he said. “A Cuba Libre.”
But a moment later there was another fly caught in the ointment where it beat futile wings and expired. In an indefinite manner things were not right.
“I have lost my drink-counter,” said the professor, “and I never lose things, only misplace them. It is not in my left pocket, if that is the left one. And if the other one is the left pocket, why it is not in that one either? How will I know when I’ve had four drinks?”
“That’s easy enough,” said the girl. “I’ll tell you.”
“So are all unusual problems solved,” said the professor, “by unusual means and flashes of intuition.”
After the girl had told him that the drink he had just finished was his fourth, the professor, feeling woozy, had her call a taxi for him; then, looking in his notebook for his home address, he gave it to the driver and rode off feeling rosy and fine.
Then, after he had paid the driver, and with a quick glance at “I love you, Emily” on the last page of the notebook he went up to the house, went in, and kissed the beautiful Emily as hard as he knew how to. Then he put his hands on her shoulders and looked at her lovingly, and she at him.
“This is quite the best thing that has happened to me in a wonderful day,” he said. “I had almost forgotten that you were so beautiful.”
“It had nearly slipped my mind also,” said Emily. “And it is very sweet to be reminded of it.”
She was beautiful. And she had a look at once very affectionate and very, very quizzical; a woman full of humor and satire indeed.
“Pfirschbaum is wrong!” said the professor positively, “cataclysmically wrong. Could he but see that look on your face, so kind, so amused, so arch; he would realize just how wrong he is.”
“I’m sure that he would. I would rather like to see the look on my face myself. It must be a study of mixed emotions. Oh, you’re doing it again, you little wolf! How sweet you are! I wonder who invented kissing in the first place?”
“It is generally attributed to the Milesians, Emily, but there has lately appeared evidence that it may be even earlier. Emily, you are wonderful, wonderful.”
“I know it. But keep telling me.”
2.
Catherine came in then. She also had a quizzical look on her face, but there was something in it that was pretty dour too. And following her, and looking quite sheepish, was that little professor, what was his name? Oh yes, Diller.
The professor gave Emily one more kiss, and then turned to greet them. And suddenly a strange disquietude caught him in a grip of ice. “If he is Professor Diller, then who in multicolor blazes am I?”
Professors aren’t really absent-minded. It is just that they learn to relegate details to the background. But sometimes they don’t stay in the background, and now this detail was much to the fore. But the professor could think like a flash when necessary, and in no time at all he remembered not only who he was, but just what kind of trouble he was in.
But it didn’t help matters when, as he was leaving with Catherine, Emily called after him “It was fun, Tommy. Let’s do it again sometime.”
Nor was Catherine inclined to be quiet when he sat at home next door with her and read in his own notebook (which he now had back from Professor Dillard, after that awful mix-up when the identical-appearing reminder books of the two men had apparently been lying together on the table in the teachers’ lounge, and each man had mistakenly picked up the other’s),—when he read in his own notebook:
“You are professor T. K. C. Cromwell. The T is for Thomas. You teach Provencal and Early French Literature and teach it badly, but we must eat. This is your schedule. Never deviate from it or you will be lost—”
* * * *
Now, if he had had his own notebook all the time, he would never have made such series of silly mistakes. Most of the trouble that comes to people in this world comes from reading the wrong books.
“To think,” said Catherine, “that a grown man could make a mistake like that, if it was a mistake. There is a point beyond which absent-mindedness is no longer a joke. How did you get by with your classes?”
“I don’t know. I suspected once that I was talking total nonsense.”
“And that little Killer Diller is as bad as you are. I was never so surprised in my life as when he waltzed in here and slapped me on… why I don’t know how you men can get so confused.”
“But we’ve explained how the notebooks must have got mixed up.”
“I understand how the notebooks were mixed. I do not understand how you are so mixed. Emily is vastly amused over this. I am not so amused.”
It isn’t that professors are absent-minded. Anybody should have had sense enough not to have made the notebooks that much alike.
McGONIGAL’S WORM
Originally published in If, November 1960.
When it happened, it happened unnoticed. Though it affected all chordata on Earth (with a possible exception to be noted in a moment) nobody knew of it, not even the Prince of all chordata, Man himself. How could he have known of it so soon?
Though his lifeline had suddenly been cut, it was a long lifeline and death would still be far off. So it was not suspected for nearly twenty-four hours, not accepted even as a working theory for nearly three days, and not realized in its full implications for a week.
Now, what had occurred was a sudden and worldwide adynatogenesis of all chordata, not however, adynatotokos; this distinction for many years offered students of the phenomenon some hope.
And another hope was in the fact that one small but genuine member of chordate was not affected: an enteropneustron, a balanoglossida of the oddest sort, a creature known as McGonigal’s Worm. Yet what hope this creature could offer was necessarily a small one.
The catastrophe was first sensed by a hobbyist about a day after it occurred. It was just that certain experiments did not act right and the proper results were not forthcoming. And on the second day (Monday) there were probably a hundred notations of quite unusual and unstatistical behavior, but as yet the pattern was not at all suspected.
On the third day a cranky and suspicious laboratory worker went to a supply house with the angry charge that he had been sold sterile mice. This was something that could not be ignored, and it is what brought the pattern of the whole thing into the open, with corroboration developing with explosive rapidity. Not completely in the open, of course, for fear of panic if it reached the public. Out throughout the learned community the news went like a seismic shock.
When it did reach the public a week later, though, it was greeted with hoots of laughter. The people did not believe it.
* * * *
“The cataloguing of evidence becomes tiresome,” said Director Conrad of the newly originated Palingenesia Institute. “The facts are incontrovertible. There has been a loss of the power to conceive in sea squirt, lancelet, hag fish, skate, sea cat, fish, frog, alligator, snake, turtle, seal, porpoise, mouse, bat, bird, hog, horse, monkey, and man. It happened suddenly, perhaps instantaneously. We cannot find the
cure. Yet it is almost certain that those children already in the womb will be the last born on Earth. We do not know whether it is from a natural cause or an enemy has done this to us. We have for ten months, tested nearly everything in the world and we have found no answer. Yet, oddly enough, there is no panic.”
“Except among ourselves,” said Appleby, his assistant, “whose province is its study. But the people have accepted it so completely that their main interest now is in the world sweepstakes, with the total sums wagered now in the billions.”
“Yes, the betting on the last child to be born in the world. It will prove one point, at least. The old legal limit on posthumous paternity was a year and a day. Will it be surpassed? The Algerian claimant on all evidence has nearly three months to go. And the betters on the Afghan have not yet given up. The Spanish Pretender is being delayed, according to rumor, medically, and there are some pretty angry protests about this. It is not at all fair; we know that. But then a comprehensive set of rules was never drawn up to cover all nations; Spain simply chose not to join the pact. But there may be trouble if the Spanish backers try to collect.”
“And there is also a newly heard of Mexican claimant.”
“I give little credit to this Juanita-Come-Lately. If she was to be a serious contestant why was she not known of before?”
The Algerian claimant, however, was the winner. And the time was an unbelievable three hundred and eighty-eight days. So the last child on Earth, in all likelihood, had been born.
There were now about thirty institutes working on the problem, most of them on an international basis. Thirteen years had gone by and one hope had died. This was that those already in the womb at the time of catastrophe might themselves prove to be fertile. It was now seen that this would not prove so, unless for some reason it was to be quite a delayed fertility.
The R a Lafferty Fantastic Megapack Page 13