Except that one night when the kid took his break, we were all so busy getting our forty-five-second fix on the stool that no one noticed Lady mean-hip it back to the john and walk right in on him, screaming:
Let me see it, you bastard. You’ve got no body, you freak! You’ve got no body under your clothes.
Big Naomi made it back there like the long arm of the law and drug Lady out to the middle of the floor by the hair and bounced her off the hardwood a few times like a basketball until she was stone out. Fire carried her out to the car and we got back to taking our turns.
That’s the night the kid motioned me toward tire pad where he’d written:
OK. ENOUGH FREE RIDES. FIVE BUCKS A HEAD FROM NOW ON. WE SPLIT. SIXTY-FORTY. GUESS WHO’S FORTY?
I argued a little:
EXCEPT FOR LADY, NO ONE’S GOT THAT KIND OF MONEY.
THEY’LL GET IT.
After a bit more pencil-pushing, I agreed. The five-dollar tab didn’t make a dent. One morning the daily paper said the crime rate had gone up sixty percent. I was guiltless. I was the forty.
In no time at all, the kid was raking it in. Big Naomi got to bugging me about what he did with all that money.
We don’t even know where he live, she said. I bet he live like a prince somewhere.
So one night all boozed up we decided to follow him home. We kept a good block away and after he’d led us a chase around thirteen corners and was about to turn another one, Naomi left me in mid-block.
You go on, she said. I head around the other way.
A few minutes later I met her huffing and puffing around the block. The kid had disappeared. We were standing in front of a row of warehouses when this piece of paper came floating down. On it was printed:
TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW, HUH?
❖
A week later Big Naomi talked him into staying after the bar closed and we’d shooed everyone out.
WERE YOU LIVE? Naomi printed.
ON THE WING.
YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS YOU GOT?
SOME IDEA. WHY?
YOU IS TOUCHED. YOU IS A PRESENCE.
MAYBE I’M CURSED.
WHY YOU SAY THAT?
BECAUSE IF YOU’VE GOT SOMETHING SPECIAL, CERTAIN PEOPLE WONT LEAVE YOU ALONE. ZEROES ARE DANGEROUS. IF THEY CAN’T BUY WHAT YOU’VE GOT, THEY’LL TRY TO KILL IT.
LIKE LADY?
A LOCAL EXAMPLE.
DON’T WORRY ABOUT HER.
I HAVE TO.
WHY?
YOU’LL SEE.
❖
Naomi wanted to keep Lady and Fire out. I thought of business. No telling how long the kid would stay. Or his battery or whatever-the-hell-it-was might run down. Lady was a big spender.
But sure enough she kept bugging the kid. Offered him a flat five hundred for exclusive rights to his seat. He grinned.
Sometimes she’d wait until he went to the john and address the bar:
What’s he do back there for five minutes? Always five minutes, no more no less. I don’t think he’s even got a dick! He’s up to something. I’ll bet my ass on that.
You’d bet your ass on anything, Naomi said.
Old man Johnson said he heard sawing noises back there. No one ever listened to old man Johnson.
❖
Things quietened down a little. And when the kid wasn’t around we tried to put into words what happened when you sat on his seat.
Old man Johnson said: Like all the blackeyed peas in the world turned technicolor in a sweet forest of turnip greens.
A speed-freak poet said: Sixteen simultaneous orgasms triple-flipping sunward in a Sabre jet’s ejector seat.
To me: A thousand daybreaks without a hangover.
An old lecher said it was like sliding bareassed down a whore’s tongue.
To a down-and-out ex college teacher: Pure mitosis. Prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telephase.
And for Big Naomi: For forty-five seconds I tripped the light fantastic, honey. Pure starshine and moonbeam, I entered a honeysuckle, dreamed the dawn and got done by a butterfly, did by a bee.
All the while Fire and Lady Night sitting around deep and full of ruin: two earthquakes eyeing a sandcastle.
❖
It had to happen one night and it did. In walks Lady in a purple-green see-through dress aglow with miniature snake’s eyes. She held to one of Fire’s elegantly clad arms. Under the other he carried an oversized violin case.
They sat murky in a booth like two freak birds trying to hatch a snapping turtle. I tried to keep one eye on the case, but the bar was so busy I forgot about it. The kid eyed it from time to time, as though he could see inside. He’d had only two drinks, and he whipped out his pad and wrote:
TIRED OF SCOTCH.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE, I penciled.
He grinned, scribbling: TO HEAR KING KONG READ ALOUD A BRAILLE EDITION OF HEIDI—IN FALSETTO.
WHAT? I asked.
NEVER MIND, JUST A GLASS OF WATER. I’M GOING TO NEED IT.
The way Lady and Fire looked I was expecting the worst. And I guess if that’s what you go around expecting, you get it. The kid went back to the john. Big Naomi was so busy guarding the seat, she didn’t see Lady and Fire head that way. Fire shucked the violin case and came up with an army-surplus flame thrower.
Someone screamed.
Lady opened the john door and Fire blazed away until the men’s room was an oven.
It happened so fast, I’m not sure what happened when. Old man Johnson said the lights went out when Fire opened up. The speed-freak poet said he heard KA-WHAM.
Someone tackled Fire. Big Naomi grabbed the flame thrower and broke it in half, then backhanded Lady twenty feet across the room. We started a water brigade from the bar sink. Finally the smoke cleared and there was nothing in that room at all.
Only a sooty commode, a sink and a mirror. Not a sign of the kid.
He got out the window, said old man Johnson.
But there was no window.
We were all so busy trying to figure out what happened we didn’t see Lady and Fire fighting over the kid’s seat until Fire knocked her down and jumped on the stool. He got up transformed:
Shut my mouth, he said. Sixteen ton of watermelon hearts, strung on a necklace of chitlins.
Lady was on the seat then, aglow like a Campfire girl. When Big Naomi pulled her off she broke into a full-throated version of “Ave Maria” that made us all cry.
Big Naomi climbed on the stool and nothing happened. It was all over. The seat was stone cold.
❖
I closed the bar for good that night. It was enough to drive a man to not drink. The place has been vacant for six months.
Big Naomi lost two hundred and thirty pounds and breeds butterflies at the children’s zoo.
Lady Night joined the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and sings the “Hallelujah Chorus” in eight languages.
I joined AA and opened an all-night sidewalk ice cream café.
Down the street, Fire gives away Good Humors.
❖
A few nights ago I went down to the bar and stood for a long while studying the blackened interior of the men’s room. I found something we’d all overlooked: a neat little square of wood sawed out of the floor. Beneath there was plenty of room for a skinny guy to escape. And in the dark on the ground below was a notepad. On it was printed in big bold letters:
HEY, ZEROES! A TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW, HUH?
Frederik Pohl
The Fiend
Frederik Pohl, a resident of Palatine, Illinois, is one of science fiction’s most illustrious luminaries. Once agent to some of the top writers in the business, he became the Hugo-winning editor of If, Galaxy, and other magazines. His many excellent anthologies include Beyond the End of Time, Assignment in Tomorrow and an erstwhile series of Galaxy “bests.” As a writer, he has employed several pseudonyms and has collaborated with Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey, ex-wife Judith Merrill and others. His novel of life on Mars, Man Alive, won the 1977 Nebul
a. “The Fiend” is from his 1966 collection, Digits and Dastards.
HOW BEAUTIFUL she was, Dandish thought, and how helpless. The plastic identification ribbon around her neck stood out straight, and as she was just out of the transport capsule, she wore nothing else. “Are you awake?” he asked, but she did not stir.
Dandish felt excitement building up inside him; she was so passive and without defense. A man could come to her now and do anything at all to her, and she would not resist. Or, of course, respond. Without touching her, he knew that her body would be warm and dry. It was fully alive, and in a few minutes she would be conscious.
Dandish—who was the captain and sole crew member of the interstellar ship without a name carrying congealed colonists across the long, slow, empty space from the Earth to a planet that circled a star that had never had a name in astronomical charts, only a number, and was now called Eleanor—passed those minutes without looking again at the girl, whose name he knew to be Silvie but whom he had never met. When he looked again, she was awake, jackknifed against the safety straps of the crib, her hair standing out around her head and her face wearing an expression of anger. “All right. Where are you? I know what the score is,” she said. “Do you know what they can do to you for this?”
Dandish was startled. He did not like being startled, for it frightened him. For nine years the ship had been whispering across space; he had had enough loneliness to satisfy him, and he had been frightened. There were 700 cans of colonists on the ship, but they lay brittle and changeless in their bath of liquid helium and were not very good company. Outside the ship the nearest human being was perhaps two light-years away, barring some chance-met ship heading in the other direction that was actually far more remote than either star, since the forces involved in stopping and matching course with a vessel bound home were twice as great as, and would take twice as much time as, those involved in the voyage itself. Everything about the trip was frightening. The loneliness was a terror. To stare down through an inch of crystal and see nothing but far stars led to panic. Dandish had decided to stop looking out five years before, but had not been able to keep to his decision, and so now and again peeped through the crystal and contemplated his horrifying visions of the seal breaking, the crystal popping out on a breath of air, himself in his metal prison tumbling, tumbling forever down to the heart of one of the ten million stars that lay below. In this ship a noise was an alarm. Since no one but himself was awake, to hear a scratch of metal or a thud of a moving object striking something else, however tiny, however remote, was a threat, and more than once Dandish had suffered through an itch of fear for hours or days until he tracked down the exploded light tube or unsecured door that had startled him. He dreamed uneasily of fire. This was preposterously unlikely in the steel-and-crystal ship, but what he was dreaming of was not the fire of a house but the monstrous fires in the stars beneath.
“Come out where I can see you,” commanded the girl.
Dandish noted that she had not troubled to try to cover her nakedness. Bare she woke and bare she stayed. She had unhitched the restraining webbing and left the crib, and now she was prowling the room in which she had awakened, looking for him. “They warned us,” she called. “‘Watch the hook!’ Took out for the space nuts!’ ‘You’ll be sorry!’ That’s all we heard at the Reception Center, and now here you are, all right. Wherever you are. Where are you? For God’s sake, come out so I can see you.” She half stood and half floated at an angle to the floor, nibbling at imperceptible bits of dead skin on her lips and staring warily from side to side. She said, “What was the story you were going to tell me? A subspace meteorite destroyed the ship, all but you and me, and we were doomed to fly endlessly toward nowhere, so there was nothing for us to do but try to make a life for ourselves?”
Dandish watched her through the view eyes in the reviving room, but did not answer. He was a connoisseur of victims, Dandish was. He had spent a great deal of time planning this. Physically she was perfect, very young, slim, slight. He had picked her out on that basis from among the 352 female canned colonists, leafing through the microfile photographs that accompanied each colonist’s dossier like a hi-fi hobbyist shopping through a catalogue. She had been the best of the lot. Dandish was not skilled enough to be able to read a personality profile and in any event considered psychologists to be phonies and their profiles trash, so he had had to go by the indices he knew. He had wanted his victim to be innocent and trusting. Silvie, 16 years old and a little below average in intelligence, had seemed very promising. It was disappointing that she did not react with more fear. “They’ll give you fifty years for this!” she shouted, looking around to see where he could be hiding. “You know that, don’t you?”
The revival crib, sensing that she was out of it, was quietly stowing and rearming itself, ready to be taken out and used again. Its plastic sheets slipped free of the corners, rolled up in a tight spiral, and slid into a disposal chute, revealing aseptic new sheets below. Its radio-warming generators tested themselves with a surge of high-voltage current, found no flaws, and shut themselves off. The crib sides folded down meekly. The instrument table hooded itself over. The girl paused to watch it, then shook her head and laughed. “Scared of me?” she called. “Come on, let’s get this over with! Or else,” she added, “admit you’ve made a boo-boo, get me some clothes, and let’s talk this over sensibly.”
Sorrowfully Dandish turned his gaze away. A timing device reminded him that it was time to make his routine half-hour check of the ship’s systems and, as he had done more than 150,000 times already and would do 100,000 times again, he swiftly scanned the temperature readings in the can hold, metered the loss of liquid helium and balanced it against the withdrawals from the reserve, compared the ship’s course with the flight plan, measured the fuel consumption and rate of flow, found all systems functioning smoothly, and returned to the girl. It had taken only a minute or so, but already she had found the comb and mirror he had put out for her and was working angrily at her hair. One fault in the techniques of freezing and revivification lay in what happened to such elaborated structures as fingernails and hair. At the temperature of liquid helium all organic matter was brittle as Prince Rupert’s drops, and although the handling techniques were planned with that fact in mind, the body wrapped gently in elastic cocooning, every care exercised to keep it from contact with anything hard or sharp, nails and hair had a way of being snapped off. The Reception Center endlessly drummed into the colonists the importance of short nails and butch haircuts, but the colonists were not always convinced. Silvie now looked like a dummy on which a student wigmaker had failed a test. She solved her problem at last by winding what remained of her hair in a tiny bun and put down the comb, snapped-off strands of hair floating in the air all about her like a stretched-out sandstorm.
She patted the bun mournfully and said, “I guess you think this is pretty funny.”
Dandish considered the question. He was not impelled to laugh. Twenty years before, when Dandish was a teenager with the long permanented hair and the lacquered fingernails that were the fashion for kids that year, he had dreamed almost every night of just such a situation as this. To own a girl of his own—not to love her or to rape her or to marry her, but to possess her as a slave, with no one anywhere to stop him from whatever he chose to impose on her—had elaborated itself in a hundred variations nightly. He didn’t tell anyone about his dream, not directly, but in the school period devoted to practical psychology he had mentioned it as something he had read in a book, and the instructor, staring right through him into his dreams, told him it was a repressed wish to play with dolls. “This fellow is role playing,” he said, “acting out a wish to be a woman. These clear-cut cases of repressed homosexuality can take many forms”—and on and on, and although the dreams were as physically satisfying as ever, the young Dandish awoke from them both reproved and resentful.
But Silvie was neither a dream nor a doll. “I’m not a doll!” said Silvie, so shar
ply and patly that it was a shock. “Come on out and get it over with!”
She straightened up, holding to a free-fall grip, and although she looked angry and annoyed, she still did not seem afraid. “Unless you are really crazy,” she said clearly, “which I doubt, although I have to admit it’s a possibility, you aren’t going to do anything I don’t want you to do, you know. Because you can’t get away with it, right? You can’t kill me—you could never explain it, and besides they don’t let murderers run ships in the first place, and so when we land, all I have to do is yell cop and you’re running a subway shuttle for the next ninety years.” She giggled. “I know about that. My uncle got busted on income-tax evasion, and now he’s a self-propelled dredge in the Amazon delta, and you should see the letters he writes. So come on out and let’s see what I’m willing to let you get away with.”
She grew impatient. “Kee-rist,” she said, shaking her head. “I sure get the great ones. And, oh, by the way, as long as I’m up, I have to go to the little girls’ room, and then I want breakfast.”
Dandish took some small satisfaction in that these requirements, at least, he had foreseen. He opened the door to the washroom and turned on the warmer oven where emergency rations were waiting. By the time Silvie came back, biscuits, bacon and hot coffee were set out for her.
“I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?” she said. “Well, I’ll live. How about some clothes? And how about coming out so I can get a look at you?” She stretched and yawned and then began to eat. Apparently she had showered, as was generally desirable on awakening from freeze-sleep to get rid of the exfoliated skin, and she had wrapped her ruined hair in a small towel. Dandish had left the one small towel in the washroom, reluctantly, but it had not occurred to him that his victim would wrap it around her head. Silvie sat thoughtfully staring at the remains of her breakfast and then after a while said, like a lecturer:
Lovers and Other Monsters Page 37