So we went in, and we sat through the second feature and were duly reminded of what life was like—and worse, what death was like—in those distant days a few years ago when Contact didn’t exist. When the lights went up briefly between the two pictures, I turned to toy wife.
“I must say—” I began and broke off short, staring.
He was there, right across the aisle from us. I knew it was Mack, not just someone who looked like Mack, because of the way he was trying to duck down into his collar and prevent me from recognizing him. I pointed, and my wife’s face went absolutely chalk-white.
We started to get to our feet. He saw us, and ran.
I caught him halfway down the block, grabbing his arm and spinning him round, and I said, “What in hell is this all about? This is just about the dirtiest trick that anyone ever played on me!”
If anything happened to those kids, of course, that was the end. You couldn’t make a Contact for a child till past the age of reading, at the earliest.
And he had the gall to try and argue with me. To make excuses for himself. He said something like, “I’m sorry, but I got so worried I couldn’t stand it any longer. I made sure everything was all right, and I only meant to be out for a little while, and—”
My wife had caught up by now, and she turned it on. I never suspected before that she knew so many dirty words, but she did, and she used them, and she finished up by slapping him across the face with her purse before leading me into a dash for the car. All the way home she was telling me what an idiot I’d been to get tangled up with Mack, and I was saying what was perfectly true—that I did the guy a favor because I didn’t think anyone should have to be lonely and without a Contact any more—but true or not it sounded hollow.
The most terrifying sound I ever heard was the noise of those two kids squalling as we came in. But nothing was wrong with either of them except they were lonely and miserable, and we comforted them and made a fuss of them till they quietened down.
The outside door opened while we were breathing sighs of relief and there he was again. Of course, we’d left him a key to the door while we were out, in case he had to step round the corner or anything. Well, a few minutes is one thing—but tracking us to the movie house and then sitting through the show was another altogether.
I was practically speechless when I saw who it was. I let him get the first few words in because of that. He said, “Please, you must understand! All I wanted was to make sure nothing happened to you! Suppose you’d had a crash on the way to the movie, and I didn’t know—where would I be then? I sat there and worried about it till I just couldn’t stand any more, and all I meant to do was make sure you were safe, but when I got down to the movie house I got worried about your coming home safe and—”
I still hadn’t found any words because I was so blind angry. So, since I couldn’t take any more, I wound up and let him have it on the chin. He went halfway backwards through the open door behind him, catching at the jamb to stop himself falling, and his face screwed up like a mommy’s darling who’s got in a game too rough for him and he started to snivel.
“Don’t drive me away!” he moaned. “You’re the only friend I have in the world! Don’t drive me away!”
“Friend!” I said. “After what you did this evening I wouldn’t call you my friend if you were the last guy on Earth! I did you a favor and you’ve, paid it back exactly the way Mary said you would. Get the hell out of here and don’t try to come back, and first thing in the morning I’m going to stop by at a Contact agency and have you expunged!”
“No!” he shrieked. I never thought a man could scream like that— as though red-hot irons had been put against his face. “No! You can’t do that! It’s inhuman! It’s—”
I grabbed hold of him and twisted the key out of his fingers, and for all he tried to cling to me and went on blubbering I pushed him out of the door and slammed it in his face.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay tossing and turning, staring up into the darkness. After half an hour of this, I heard my wife sit up in the other bed.
“What’s the trouble, honey?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess maybe I feel ashamed of myself for kicking Mack out the way I did.”
“Nonsense!” she said sharply. “You’re too soft-hearted. You couldn’t have done anything else. Lonely, or not lonely, he played a disgusting, wicked trick on us—leaving the twins alone like that after he’d promised! You didn’t promise him anything. You said you were doing him a favor. You couldn’t know what sort of a person he’d turn out to be. Now you relax and go to sleep. I’m going to wake you early and make sure of getting you to a Contact agency before you go in to work.”
At that precise moment, as though he’d been listening, I picked him up.
I could never describe—not if I tried for twenty lifetimes—the slimy, underhand, snivelly triumph that was in his mind when it happened. I couldn’t convey the sensation of “Yah, tricked you again!” Or the undertone of “You treated me badly, see how badly I can treat you.”
I think I screamed a few times when I realized what had happened. Of course. He’d conned me into making a Contact with him, just as he’d done to a lot of other people before—only they’d seen through him in good time and expunged without telling him, so that when he found out, it was too late to cheat on the deal the way he’d cheated me.
I’d told him I was going to expunge him in the morning —that’s a unilateral decision, as they call it, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop me. Something in my voice must have shown that I really meant it. Because, though he couldn’t stop me, he could forestall me, and he’d done exactly that.
He’d shot himself in the heart.
I went on hoping for a little while. I fought the nastiness that had come into my mind—sent my wife and kids off to her parents again over the weekend—and tried to sweat it out by myself. I didn’t make it. I was preoccupied for a while finding out exactly how many lies Mack had told me —about his reform school, his time in jail, his undiscovered thefts and shabby tricks played on people he called friends like the one he’d played on me—but then it snapped, and I had to go and call up my father-in-law and find out if my wife had arrived yet, and she hadn’t, and I chewed my nails to the knuckle and called up my old friend Hank, who said hullo, yes of course I still have your Contact you old so-and-so and how are you and say I may be flying up to New York next weekend—
I was horrified. I couldn’t help it. I guess he thought I was crazy or at any rate idiotically rude, when I tried to talk him out of flying up, and we had a first-rate argument which practically finished with him saying he’d expunge the Contact if that was the way I was going to talk to an old pal.
Then I panicked and had to call my kid brother Joe, and he wasn’t home—gone somewhere for the weekend, my part of my mind told me, and nothing to worry about. But Mack’s part of my mind said he was probably dead and my old friend was going to desert me and pretty soon I wouldn’t have a Contact at all and then I’d be permanently dead and how about that movie last night with people being killed and having no Contacts at all?
So I called my father-in-law again and yes my wife and the twins were there now and they were going on the lake in a boat belonging to a friend and I was appalled and tried to say that it was too dangerous and don’t let them and I’d come up myself and hold them back if I had to and—
It hasn’t stopped. It’s been quite a time blending Mack in with the rest of me; I hoped and hoped that when the click came things would be better. But they’re worse.
Worse?
Well—I can’t be sure about that. I mean, it’s true that until now I was taking the most appalling risks. Like going out to work all day and leaving my wife at home alone— why, anything might have happened to her! And not seeing Hank for months on end. And not checking with Joe every chance I got, so that if he was killed I could have time to fix up another Contact to take his place.
It’s safer now, though. Now 1 have this gun, and I don’t go out to work, and I don’t let my wife out of my sight at all, and we’re going to drive very carefully down to Joe’s place, and stop him doing foolish things too, and when I’ve got him lined up, we’ll go to Hank’s and prevent him from making that insanely risky flight to New York and then maybe things will be okay.
The thing that worries me, though, is that I’ll have to go to sleep some time, and—what if something happens to them all when I’m asleep?
<
* * * *
Come, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings...
In a year of much violence and tension, many displays of courage both wise and foolhardy—and a large number of shocking public deaths—too many by violence—the most profound shock and loss, to me, was the peaceful passing of Richard McKenna, who died in his sleep at the age of fifty-one of no known cause. Mac had published only a handful of short stories; I had the honor of reprinting the first one, “Casey Agonistes,” in an earlier Annual. He had written one fairy-tale-successful book, The Sand Pebbles, which he himself regarded as his “apprentice novel.” He did not live long enough to finish the second. What follows is from a speech he delivered at the University of North Carolina, in December, 1962:
“Any human life from birth to death can be understood as a gestalt in time. The linear sequence of any man’s experience and behavior forms a meaningful pattern, just as do the sequential notes of a musical composition. They form a mosaic distributed in time rather than in space. The arrangement is governed by the same principles as a spatial gestalt and closure can come only with death. A human life is an integrated whole which is more than the sum of its parts. But the wholeness is not achieved, nor is the final degree of integration achieved, until death. Therefore any experience, no matter how far back it seems to lie along the time-track, is not complete either. It will not be complete until the gestalt is closed and each experience making it up is given its final significance by virtue of its place in, and contribution to, the whole.
“The individual human past is not immutable. Everything in it is still happening and will not cease to happen until the gestalt is closed. Every past experience is subject to change, as the configuration of the forming whole is changed. Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, cannot avoid doing so, cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product, because that is one of the fundamental consequences of being human.
“When I first met that thought, I found it a very huge one. I have since improved my grip upon it by alternate approaches through existential philosophy, but it is still the scientific formulation of it which for me affords the most conviction. It is not a new thought. ... It is contained in the proverb, “While there’s life, there’s hope.”
I think that can be stated inversely. Most religions, probably all revolutions, have based their philosophy on the postulate: While there is hope, there is life. If the hope outlasts the individual’s life-span (as it may well do, in religion, in revolution, in any life of dedication to creativity), perhaps the final configuration of the life itself remains open to change, when the body is already in decay.
* * * *
THE MAN WHO FOUND PROTEUS
Robert Rohrer
Jake came running out of the mine like all hell and stopped just outside and looked back inside and stood panting into the mouth of the cave for a good while. Jake’s eyes were wide open and his face was white under the dirt, just like he was scared. As a matter of fact, he was scared.
Jake stood there looking into the mine with his shirt front going up and down and the hair on his neck going mostly up, and the mine was dark so Jake could not see a damned thing, which was fine with him. He’d seen enough ee-nough.
Finally, when it looked like nothing was going to come out of the mine and get him, Jake stopped panting and started thinking. This was a bad move, especially for Jake, and the situation got pretty unhealthy. Jake started thinking that maybe he was crazy. He was getting old, and he’d been living out there on the edge of the desert for a long time with this mine that didn’t look like it was going to be any great shakes, and he started thinking, “Well, maybe I’m goin’ crazy.” After all, you don’t see a chunk of rock get up and walk away just every day. You don’t see anything like that at all, unless you’re sort of off, so Jake started thinking, “Maybe I’m goin’—crazy.”
Jake was standing there thinking and his old mule was standing there thinking, too, Jake had one of those old mules just like every dried-up prospector has, and Jake said to the mule, “Mule, I think mebbe I’m goin’ crazy.”
Mule said, “Mebbe y’are, Jake.”
Jake said, “Gawd!” and he ran pretty quick into his shack. When he’d closed the door he sat down on that half-rotten cot he had and he began to think some more, and things got unhealthy again. Jake started pulling his hair out and hitting himself on the head; he was tolerably upset.
Finally Jake got up enough grit to look out the window of his shack and see if Mule was still out there. There was Mule, standing out on the dead orange ground, chewing on something that Jake couldn’t imagine what it was because all the food was in the back of the shack.
Mule looked up at Jake with two solid black eyes and hollered, “Hey Jake, where’s muh food, I’m hongry.”
Jake yelled out the window, “You ain’t gonna get no food from me, you dam’ mule!”
“Aw-w-w,” said Mule, and turned into a trickle of water and went splish-splash into the mine.
Jake said, “Gawd!” and was about ready to stand on his head when he thought, “Hold on there, Jake, get a-holt of yourself,” which was the first healthy thought he’d had in a good time. “There’s gotta be one o’ them logical explanations for this, asides that I’m loco, which mebbe I am,” he thought, and he sat down on the dirt floor and concentrated, hard.
* * * *
After a while he started a headache from all that hard thinking, and he still couldn’t figure out a logical explanation for a rock getting up and walking off, or a mule talking and then turning into water. Jake muttered, “That ain’t no way for a ol’ mule to act,” and he kept on thinking, that ain’t no way for a ol’ mule to act, that ain’t no way for a of mule to act; and then he got a pretty good-sized idea for his type brain. Maybe that mule he saw out there wasn’t a mule.
Jake jumped up and went around back of the shack where he kept Mule hitched up, and sure enough, Mule’s bridle was there all hitched to the hitching post and dangling in the air, and there were some white mule-bones lying on the hard baked earth.
Jake got a nasty look on his face and said, “Somebody et my mule.” He and Mule had been pretty good friends. Mule was the only one left from the old days before the others had died, and now Mule was gone and old Jake was all alone. Jake was pretty mad, and he stomped around past the three crosses to the front of the shack again because he wanted to get his old shotgun.
He stopped cold before he went inside because somebody had written in big red-crayon letters across the face of the shack, “I’M HUNGRY.” This made Jake pretty sure that there was some no-good lout out there who was running around eating mules and who ought to have his head blown off, so Jake walked into the shack and loaded up his shotgun and put the box of shells in his pocket.
Just when he was about to go outside again, there were a couple of knocks on the door, and Jake shot his gun straight at the door. That pretty well tore the door to hell, and Jake didn’t hear anybody yelling so he cussed because he figured he’d missed and ruined the door for nothing.
He loaded up again and pushed open what was left of that door. Right away his mouth fell open, because out there on the ground in big red clear block-type letters was “I’M HUNGRY!” There were even a block-type exclamation point and a block-type underline.
Jake said, “Wha-a-a-t the hell?” Right while he watched, those letters changed around until they said “I’
LL EAT ANYTHING!”
Jake said, “Rg-l-s-p-ch?” which was a pretty complicated word for Jake.
The letters sat there for a while and finally they changed and said, “WELL?”
By that time Jake had gotten a little bit of control over himself, and he said, “Who the Bill Hill Blazes are you, anyhow?”
“The letters wriggled around and said, “I AM PROTEUS.” They wriggled around again and said, “I HAVE COME A LONG WAY.” They wriggled around again and said, “I DO NOT KNOW WHERE THE HELL I AM.” They wriggled around again and said, “I AM LOST. I AM STARVING.” They wriggled around again and said, “GIVE ME FOOD, CHOP-CHOP.”
“You already et muh mule,” said Jake, since he’d figured out that this Proteus must have eaten Mule.
“YOUR MULE WAS FULL OF LICE./I NEED SOMETHING WITH VITAMINS AND/MINERALS TO GET ME OUT OF THIS/HOLE.”
“Well, you ain’t gettin’ nothin’ from me,” said Jake, and he let those letters have it right in the vowels with his shotgun. The letters got together in one heap and hopped back into the mine.
The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology] Page 43