“Killy, you never said a word to me about what I did. With those men, Karl and the Koala.…”
“What word should I say?”
She looked at her hands. “You’ve read books. Insane jealousies and bitterness and distrust.…”
“Oh,” he said. He thought hard for a moment. “The things you did were … just little, unimportant, corroborative details. The big thing was that you had gone. I didn’t like your going. But I didn’t feel that a part of me was doing those things; which is the feeling jealous people have. You didn’t stray when you were with me. You won’t when you come back.”
“No,” she said almost inaudibly. “I won’t. But, Killy, that’s what I mean when I say you don’t react morally. Morals, per se, would have killed what we have together. Ethics—and here it’s just another name for our respect for one another—have saved it. Another argument for the higher survival value of ethics.”
They sat quietly then, together in the easy chair that was built for one, and were quiet, until Killilea looked at his watch, extricated himself from the chair, and went to Croy.
“It’s almost time, Croy,” he said levelly. “Go into your act. You feel up to it?”
Croy swung his feet down and shook his head violently. “My face is made of rubber and my heart thinks I’m running the three hundred meter,” he said. “I’ll make it, though.”
“Come on, Prue.”
They went into the bedroom, turned out the light, and closed the door until just a finger’s breadth of golden light showed from the living room lamp.
They waited.
The doorbell rang. Croy started for the door. “That’s downstairs,” Killilea murmured. “Push the button in the kitchenette. And don’t forget the door here is locked when you try to open it. Speak fairly loud so he will too. I’ll take your cues. And Croy, God help you if—”
Prue’s hand slid up and covered his mouth. “Good luck, Mr. Croy,” she said.
The buzzer hissed like a snake. Croy drew a deep breath, crossed the room, unlocked the door and opened it. “Where are they?” said a hoarse voice.
“In there,” said Croy, “but wait … what are you going to do?”
“What do you expect?” said the newcomer. Killilea could see him now—short, heavy, almost chinless; wide forehead, low hairline.
“You’re going to kill them,” said Croy.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Have you thought about the details—what happens when the bodies are found, what will the police do?”
The stranger opened his overcoat and from what must have been a special pocket drew out a leather-covered wooden case. He set it on the table, opened it, and took out a hypodermic. He grinned briefly. “Heart failure. So common nowadays.”
“Two cases at once?”
“Hmm. You have something there. Well … I can take one of them away in my car.”
“I was wondering,” Croy said tightly, “if you’d expect me to do it.”
The man regarded him without expression. “It’s a possibility.”
“It would mean I’d have to leave here alive. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
The man laughed. “Oh, I see! My dear fellow, you needn’t fear for yourself. Aside from considerations of friendship—even admiration—I couldn’t possibly complete my plans for the Board without you.”
Killilea, his eye fixed to the crack of the door, felt an urgent tugging at his shoulder. Killilea backed away and let her work her way silently around him so that she could see as well.
The man started toward the bedroom. Croy said evenly, “Where have I seen you before?”
The man stopped without turning. The needle glinted in his hand. “I have no idea. I doubt that you ever have.”
“I have, though. I have—someplace.…”
Prue gasped suddenly. Killilea took her shoulders and with one easy motion flung her through the air. She landed on the middle of the bed. The gasp alerted their visitor who dove for the door. Killilea stepped aside and let it crash open. Light from the living room flooded the man’s broad back as he stopped, blinking, in the darkness, peering from one side to the other. Killilea stood up on tiptoe and with all his strength brought the edge of his right hand down on the nape of the man’s neck. He went down flat with no sound but his falling, and lay still.
Killilea was gasping as if he had run up steps. He bent and lifted the man’s shoulder. It fell back loosely. “Out, all right,” said Killilea. “Prue, what got into you? You almost gave us away by making that silly—Prue! What—”
She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands over her face, shuddering. He put his arms around her. “It’s Koala,” she said. “Oh, Killy, it’s Koala.…”
Croy was standing white-faced in the doorway. “What’s she say? What’s koala mean?”
“It means a great deal. Turn him over and look at him, Croy. Maybe you’ll remember where you saw him.”
Croy bent down and rolled the heavy body over. “He’s dead!”
Killilea left the bed and ran to Croy, knelt down. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” He picked up a broken tube of glass, looked at it, laid it down on the carpet. Then he began running his fingers lightly over the front of the man’s coat.
“Careful,” said Croy.
“Oh, but yes. Here it is.” Slowly and cautiously he unbuttoned jacket, vest and shirt. The undershirt showed a small blood spot, just a drop. From its center extended the needle. Using his handkerchief folded twice, Killilea grasped it and pulled it out. It had penetrated only a fraction of an inch. “Far enough,” said Killilea and Croy gave an understanding grunt.
“Heart trouble,” said Killilea.
Croy said, “You’re still going to have … two bodies … to explain. And you don’t even know who this one is.”
“Yes I do,” said Killilea. “You do too, if you’ll only look at him.” He bent close. “Brown-tinted contact lenses,” he said. “I think his eyes are blue. Right, Prue?”
She gave a long, shuddering sigh. “Yes,” she whispered. “And he had a beard to hide that little chin.”
“Beard,” said Croy, and then dropped to his knees. “Dr. Pretorio!”
“It had to be. Now I feel like the boys at that dinner table where Columbus demonstrated how to stand an egg on end.”
“But he’s … he was dead!”
“When we get his coffin dug up—if we bother—we’ll find out who really was buried at Pretorio’s funeral,” said Killilea. “If anyone.”
“Why?” moaned Croy.
Killilea stood up and dusted off his hands. “Thought a lot of him, didn’t you, Croy? Why did he do it? I guess we’ll never know in detail. But I’d say his mind snapped. He got afraid of the Board, really his own creation, when he discovered my factor, and wanted it for himself. The Board needed wrecking, and he threw his own supposed death on the wreckage, along with his great reputation. A mind like that, working against society instead of for it, would be happier operating underground. I wonder what he would have done with the factor?”
“He told me last week that the reorganized Board could run the world,” said Croy in a small voice. “I thought he was flattering me. I thought it was a figure of speech. Oh, God. Pretorio.” Tears ran down his face.
“You’ll have to give me a hand,” said Killilea. “We’ll get him down to his car and leave him in it. And that will be that.”
“All right … do I have time?” asked Croy.
Killilea came to him. “Let’s see your tongue. Mmmm-hm!” He lifted Croy’s damp wrist and looked thoughtful. “In your condition, I’d give you about forty more years.”
Croy simply looked at him blankly. Killilea slapped him on the shoulder. “Maybe it’s morals, and maybe it’s ethics,” he said kindly, “but neither Prue nor I could sit and talk while we watched a man die. You got an injection of dilute caffeine citrate to sweat you up, and some adrenaline to make you tingle.”
Croy’s jaw opened and closed lud
icrously. At last he said, “But I’m supposed to … I have to pay for.…”
Killilea laughed. “Listen, philosopher. If you really feel nice and guilty and want to get punished—live with it, don’t die for it just so you can escape all those sleepless nights.”
Then Croy began to laugh.…
Together they got the heavy body downstairs while Prue scouted ahead. They saw no one, though they had a drunken-friend story ready. They arranged the corpse carefully behind the wheel and left it.
Back in the foyer of the apartment house, Killilea asked, “Which way do you go?”
“Bilville.”
“You can’t go all the way out there this late!” Prue cried. “Go back upstairs. You can make yourself quite comfortable there. There’s orange juice in the refrigerator, and the clean towels are—”
“But won’t you—”
“No,” said Killilea flatly, “she won’t. I’m taking my wife home.”
The Dark Room
THE WORLD ENDED AT THAT DAMN PARTY OF BECK’S.
At least if it had fallen into the sun, or if it had collided with a comet, it would have been all right with me. I mean, I’d have been able to look at that fellow in the barber chair, and that girl on the TV screen, and somebody fresh from Tasmania, and I’d have been able to say, “Ain’t it hell, neighbor?” and he would’ve looked at me with sick eyes, feeling what I felt about it.
But this was much worse. Where you sit and look around, that’s the center of the whole universe. Everything you see from there circles around you, and you’re the center. Other people share a lot of it, but they’re circling around out there too. The only one who comes right in and sits with you, looking out from the same place, is the one you love. That’s your world. Then one night you’re at a party and the one you love disappears with a smooth-talking mudhead; you look around and they’re gone; you worry and keep up the bright talk; they come back and the mudhead calls you “old man” and is too briskly polite to you, and she—she won’t look you in the eye. So the center of the universe is suddenly one great big aching nothing, nothing at all—it’s the end of your world. The whole universe gets a little shaky then, with nothing at its center.
Of course, I told myself, this is all a crazy suspicion, and you, Tom Conway, ought to hang your head and apologize. This sort of thing happens to people, but not to us. Women do this to their husbands, but Opie doesn’t do this to me—does she, does she?
We got out of there as soon as I could manage it without actually pushing Opie out like a wheelbarrow. We left party noises behind us, and I remember one deep guttural laugh especially that I took extremely personally, though I knew better. It was black dark outside, and we had to feel the margins of the path through our soles before our eyes got accustomed to the night. Neither of us said anything. I could almost sense the boiling, bottled-up surging agony in Opie, and I knew she felt it in me, because we always felt things in each other that way.
Then we were through the arched gateway in the hedge and there was concrete sidewalk under us instead of gravel. We turned north toward where the car was parked and I glanced quickly at her. All I could see was the turn of her throat, curved a bit more abruptly than usuaI because of the stiff, controlled way she was holding her head.
I said to myself, something’s happened here and it’s bad. Well, I’ll have to ask her. I know, I thought, with a wild surge of hope, I’ll ask her what happened; I’ll ask her if it was the worst possible thing, and she’ll say no, and then I’ll ask her if it’s the next worse, and so on, until when I get to it I’ll be able to say things aren’t so bad after all.
So I said, “You and that guy, did you—” and all the rest of it, in words of one syllable. The thing I’m grateful to her about is that she didn’t let one full second of silence go by before she answered me.
She said, “Yes.”
And that was the end of the world.
The end of the world is too big a thing to describe in detail. It’s too big a thing to remember clearly. The next thing that happened, as far as I can recall, is that there was gravel under my feet again and party noises ahead of me, and Opie sprinting past me and butting me in the chest to make me stop. “Where are you going?” she gasped.
I pushed her but she bounded right back against me. “Get out of the way,” I said, and the sound of my voice surprised me.
“Where are you going?” she said again.
“Back there,” I said. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Why?”
I didn’t answer that because there wasn’t room inside me for such a question, but she said, “He didn’t do it by himself, Tom. I was … I probably did more than he did. Kill me.”
I looked down at the faint moon-glimmer that told where her face was. I whispered, because my voice wouldn’t do anything else, “I don’t want to kill you, Opie.”
She said, with an infinite weariness, “There’s less reason to kill him. Come on. Let’s go—” I thought she was going to say “home,” and winced, but she realized as much as I did that the word didn’t mean anything anymore. “Let’s go,” she said.
When the world ends it doesn’t do it once and finish with the business. It rises up and happens again, sometimes two or three times in a minute, sometimes months apart but for days at a time. It did it to me again then, because the next thing I can remember is driving the car. Next to me where Opie used to sit was just a stretch of seat-cushion. Where there used to be a stretch of seat-cushion, over next to the right-hand door, Opie sat.
Back there in the path Opie had asked me a one-word question, and in me there was no room for it. Now, suddenly, there was no room in me for anything else. The word burst out of me, pressed out by itself.
“Why?”
Opie sat silently. I waited until I couldn’t stand it any longer and then looked over at her. A streetlight fled past and the pale gold wash of it raced across her face. She seemed utterly composed, but her eyes were too wide, and I sensed that she’d held them that way long enough for the eyeballs to dry and hurt her. “I asked you why,” I snarled.
“I heard you,” she said gently. “I’m just trying to think.”
“You don’t know why?”
She shook her head.
I looked straight through the windshield again and wrenched the wheel. I’d damned near climbed a bank. I was going too fast, too. I knew she’d seen it coming, and she hadn’t moved a muscle to stop it. I honestly don’t think she cared just then.
I got the car squared away and slowed down a little. “You’ve got to know why. A person doesn’t just—just go ahead and—and do something without a reason.”
“I did,” she said in that too-tired voice.
I’d already said that people don’t just do things that way, so there was no point in going over it again. Which left me nothing further to say. Since she offered nothing more, we left it like that.
A couple of days later Hank blew into my office. He shut the door, which people don’t usually do, and came over and half-sat on the desk, swinging one long leg. “What happened?” he said.
Hank is my boss, a fine guy, and Opie’s brother.
“What happened to who?” I asked him. I was as casual as a guy can be who is rudely being forced to think about something he’s trying to wall up.
He wagged his big head. “No games, Tom. What happened?”
I quit pretending. “So that’s where she is. Home to mother, huh?”
“Have you been really interested in where she is?”
“Cut it out, Hank. This ‘have you hurt my little sister, you swine’ routine isn’t like you.”
He had big amber eyes like Opie’s, and it was just as hard to tell what flexed and curled behind them. Finally he said, “You know better than that. You and Opie are grownups and usually behave like grownups.”
“We’re not now?”
“I don’t know. Tom, I’m not trying to protect Opie. Not from you. I know you both too well.”
“I just want to know what happened.”
“Why?” I rapped. There it was again: why, why, why.
He scratched his head. “Not to get sloppy about it, I want to know because I think that you and Opie are the two finest bipeds that ever got together to make a fine combo. I have one of these logical minds. A fact plus a fact plus a force gives a result. If you know all the facts, you can figure the result. I’ve been thinking for a lot of years that I know all the facts about both of you, everything that matters. And this—this just doesn’t figure. Tom, what happened?”
He was beginning to annoy me. “Ask Opie,” I spat. It sounded ugly. Why not? It was ugly.
Hank swung the foot and looked at me. I suddenly realized that this guy was miserable. “I did ask her,” he said in a choked voice.
I waited.
“She told me.”
That rocked me. “She told you what?”
“What happened. Saturday night, at Beck’s party.”
“She told you?” I couldn’t get over that. “What in time made her tell you?”
“I made her. She held out for a long while and then let me have it, in words of one syllable. I guess it was to shut me up.”
I put my head in my hands. It made a difference to have someone else in on it. I didn’t know whether I cared for the difference or not.
I jumped up then and yelled at him. “So you know what happened and you came bleating in here what happened, what happened! Why ask me, if you know?”
“You got me wrong, Tom,” he said. His voice was so soft against my yelling that it stopped me like a cut throat. “Yeah, I know what she did. What I want to know is what happened to make her do it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Have you talked to anyone about it?” he wanted to know.
I shook my head.
He spread his hands. “Talk to me about it.”
When I didn’t move, he leaned closer. “What do you say, Tom?”
“I say,” I breathed, “that I got work to do. We have a magazine to get out. This is company time, remember?”
He got up off the desk right away. Did you ever listen to someone walk away from you when you weren’t looking at him, and know by his footsteps that he was hurt and angry?
A Saucer of Loneliness Page 22