“You said it a long while back,” I said. “So did Beatrice Dix. Something about, ‘He’ll annoy you just as long as he finds the girl attractive.’ ” I laced the second shoe, demanded some money, and pounded out before I had the sentence well finished.
I rang somebody else’s bell at the apartment house and when the buzzer burped at me I headed for the stairs. I rang Iola’s bell and waited breathlessly. The knob turned and I crowded right in. She was drawing a negligee about her. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
“Gus!” She drew back, turned and ran to a lamp table. “Oh, you fool! Why do you have to make it harder for us?” She moved so fast I couldn’t stop her. She had the gun in her hand.
“Hold on, you little dope!” I roared. “That may be a way out, but you’re not going out alone. We’re going together!”
“Gus—”
“And doing it together we’re not doing it that way! Give me that thing!” I strode across the room, lifted it out of her hand. I opened the magazine, took the barrel in one hand and the butt in the other and twisted them apart, throwing the pieces at her feet. “Now get in there and get dressed. We’ve got things to do!” She hesitated, and I pushed her roughly toward the bedroom. “One of us is going to dress you,” I said somberly.
She squeaked and moved. I tramped up and down the living room, gleefully kicking the broken gun on every trip. She was ready in about four minutes; she came out frightened and puzzled and radiant. I took her wrist and dragged her out of the apartment. As soon as we passed under the garlic on the door, my skin began to tingle, then to itch, and suddenly I felt that I was a mass of open, festering sores. And on top of this came the slime again. I gritted my teeth and sluiced down my pain with sheer exultation.
We piled into a taxi and I gave an address. When Iola asked questions I laughed happily. We pulled up at a curb and I paid off the driver. “Go in there,” I said.
“A beauty parlor! But what—”
I pushed her in. A white-uniformed beautician came forward timidly. I took a strand of Iola’s white hair and tossed it. “Dye this,” I said. “Dye it black!”
“Gus!” gasped Iola. “You’re mad! I don’t want to be a brunette! I haven’t the coloring for—”
“Coloring? You know what kind of coloring you have, with those big black holes of eyes and that white skin and hair? You look like a ghost! Don’t you see? That’s why he hounded you! That’s why he loved you and was jealous of you!”
Her eyes got very bright. She looked in a mirror and said, “Gus—you remember that summer I told you about, when he first spoke to me? I was wearing a long white dress—white shoes—”
“Get in there and be a brunette,” I growled. The operator took her.
I settled down into a big chair to wait. I was suffering a thousand different agonies, a hundred different kinds of torments. Pains and horrid creeping sensations flickered over my body the way colors shift on a color-organ. I sat there taking it, and taking it, and then I heard the operator’s voice from the back of the studio. “There you are, ma’am. All done. Look in there—how do you like it?”
And deep within me I almost heard a sound like a snort of disgust, and then there was a feeling like an infinite lightening of pressure. And then my body was fresh and whole again, and the ghostly pains were gone.
Iola came out and flung her arms around my neck. As a brunette she was stunning.
Henry Gade was our best man.
The Bones
DONZEY CAME TO the door with a pair of side-cutting pliers in his hand and soldering flux smeared on the side of his jaw. “Oh—Farrel. Come in.”
“Hi, Donzey.” The town’s police force ducked his head under the doorway and followed the mechanic through a littered living room into what had once been a pantry. It was set up as a workshop, complete with vises, a power lathe, a small drill press and row upon row of tools. It was a great deal neater than the living room. By the window was a small table on which was built an extraordinarily complicated radio set which featured a spherical antenna and more tubes and transformers and condensers than a small-town bicycle repairman can be expected to buy and still eat. Farrel added a stick of gum to his already oversize wad and stared at it.
“That it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” said Donzey proudly. He sat down beside the table and picked up an electric soldering iron. “She ought to work this time,” he said, holding the iron close to his cheek to see if it were hot enough.
“And I used to think FM was the initials of a college,” said Farrel.
“Not in radio,” said Donzey. The lump of solder in his hand slumped into glittering fluidity, sealed a joint. “And this is a different kind of frequency modulation, too. This is the set that’s going to make us some real money, Farrel.”
“Yeah,” said the sheriff without enthusiasm. He was thinking of the irrepressible Donzey’s flotation motor, that was supposed to use the power developed by a chain of hollow balls floating to the top of a tank; of his ingenious plan for zoning highways by disappearing concrete walls between the lanes—a swell idea only somebody else had patented it. Also there was a little matter of a gun which could be set to fire thirty bullets at any interval between a fifth of a second to thirty minutes. Only nobody wanted it. Donzey was as unsuccessful as he was enthusiastic. He kept body and soul indifferently together only because he had infinite powers of persuasion. He could sell one of his ideas to the proverbial brass monkey—more; he could get a man like Farrel to invest capital in an idea like his directional FM transmitter. His basic principle was a signal beamed straight up, which would strike the Heaviside layer and bounce almost straight down, thus being receivable only in the receiver at which it was aimed. Donzey had got the idea over at the pool parlor. If you could aim an eight-ball at a six-ball, off the cushion, you ought to be able to aim a signal from the transmitter to the receiver, off the Heaviside layer. The thing would be handy as a wireless field telephone for military liaison.
Of course, Donzey knew little about radio. But he always worked on the theory that logic was as good or better than book-learning. His mind was as incredibly facile as his stubby fingers. What it lacked in exactitude it made up for in brilliance. Seeing the wiring on the set, an electrical engineer would have sighed and asked Donzey if he was going to put tomato sauce on all that spaghetti. Donzey would have called the engineer a hidebound conservative. Because of Donzey’s pragmatic way of working, the world will never know the wiring diagram of that set. Donzey figured that if it worked he could build more like it. If it didn’t, who cared how it was made?
Donzey laid the soldering iron on the bed it had charred out for itself on the workbench, brushed back his wiry black hair without effect, and announced that he was ready. “She may not work just yet,” he said, plugging the set in and holding his breath for a moment in silent prayer until he was sure that the fuse was not going to blow. “But then again she might.” When the tubes began to glow, he cut in the loudspeaker. It uttered a horrifying roar; he tuned it down to a hypnotic hum.
Farrel folded himself into a chair and stared glumly at the proceedings, wondering whether or not he would ever get his twenty-eight dollars and sixty cents out of this contraption. Donzey switched off the speaker and handed him a headset. “Put these on and see what you get.”
Farrel clamped the phones over his ears and tried to look bored. Donzey went back to his knobs and dials.
“Anything yet?”
“Yeah.” Farrel shifted his cud. “It howls like a houn’ dawg.”
Donzey grunted and put a finger on one phone connection and a thumb on the other. Farrel swore and snatched off the headset. “What you tryin’ to do,” he growled, rubbing a large, transparent ear, “make me deef?”
“Easy with the phones, son.” Donzey was fifteen years younger than the sheriff, but he could say “son” and make it stick. “Phone condenser’s shot. And that’s the last .00035 I have. Got to rig up something. Wait a minute.” He flew out of the
room.
Farrel sighed and walked over to the window. Donzey was locally famous for the way he “rigged things up.” He rigged up a supercharger for the municipal bandit-chaser which really worked, once you got used to its going backward in second gear. Farrel was not at all surprised to see Donzey out in the yard, busily rummaging through the garbage can.
He entered the room a moment later, unabashedly blowing the marrow out of a section of mutton bone. “Got a cigarette?” he said, wiping his mouth. Farrel dourly handed over a pack. Donzey ripped it open, spilling the smokes over the workbench. He stripped off the tinfoil, tore it in half, and after cleaning up the bone inside and out with Farrel’s handkerchief, poked some of the foil into the bone and wrapped it carefully in the other piece. “Presto,” he said. “A condenser.”
“My handkerchief—” began Farrel.
“You’ll be able to buy yourself a trainload of ’em when we put this on the market,” said Donzey with superb confidence. He busily connected the outside layer of tinfoil to one phone plug and the inside wad to the other. “Now,” he said, handing the earphones to the sheriff, “that ought to do it. I’m sending from this key. There’s no connection between transmitter and receiver. The signal’s going straight up—I hope. It should come straight down.”
“But I don’t know that dit-dot stuff,” said Farrel, putting on the headset nevertheless.
“Don’t have to,” said Donzey. “I’ll play “Turkey in the Straw.” You ought to recognize that.”
They sat down and again Donzey switched on the juice. His fingers found the key as his eyes found Farrel’s face; and then his fingers forgot about the key.
Farrel’s heavy lids closed for a long second, while his lantern jaw slowly lit up. Then the eyes began to open, slowly. At just the halfway mark, they stopped and the man did something extraordinary with his nostrils. A long sigh escaped him, and his wide lips flapped resoundingly in the breeze. His head tilted slowly to one side.
“Mmmwaw,” he said.
“Farrel!” snapped Donzey, horrified.
“M-m-ba-a-a-a—”
Before Donzey could reach him he reared up out of his chair, tossing his head back. By some miracle the earphones stayed in place. Farrel’s hands hit the floor; he landed on one palm and one wrist, which grated audibly. His huge feet kicked out and his arms gave way. He landed on his face, the wire from the headset tightened and the table on which the radio stood began to lean out from the wall. Donzey squalled and put out his arms to catch his darling; and catch it he did. His hands gripped the chassis, perfectly grounded, and as he hugged the set to him to save it, the upper terminal of a 6D6 tube contacted his chin. He suddenly felt as if a French 75 had gone off in his face. He saw several very pretty colors. One of them, he recalled later, looked like the smell of a rose, and another looked like a loud noise. He hit the floor with a bump, number instinct acting just far enough to twist his body under the precious radio. Nothing broke but the power line; and as soon as that parted, Farrel scrambled most profanely to his feet.
“Get up, you hind-end of a foot,” he roared, “so I can slap you down again!”
“Wh-wh-whooee!” said Donzey’s lungs, trying to get the knack of breathing again.
“Go away,” breathed the quivering mass under the radio. Donzey waited a few seconds, and when Farrel still continued to hang over him, he decided to go on waiting. He knew that the canny old sheriff would never plow through a cash investment to get to him. As long as the radio was perched on his chest he was safe.
“Who you fink you’re pwayin’ twickf on?” said the sheriff through a rapidly swelling lip.
“I wasn’t pwaying any twickf,” mimicked Donzey. “Sizzle down, bud. What happened?”
“I ftarted to go cwavy, vat’s all. What kind of devil’f gadget iv vat, anyway?”
Sensing that the sheriff’s anger was giving way to self-pity, Donzey took a chance on lifting the radio off himself. “My gosh, man—you’re hurt!”
Farrel followed Donzey’s eyes to his rapidly swelling wrist. “Yeah … I—Hey! It hurts!” he said, surprised.
“It should,” said Donzey. While Farrel grunted, he bound it against a piece of board, and then went for a couple of ice cubes for the now balloon-like lip. As soon as Farrel was comfortable, Donzey started asking questions.
“What happened when I switched on the set?”
Farrel shuddered. “It was awful. I seen pictures.”
“Pictures? You mean—pictures, like television?” Donzey’s gadgeteer’s heart leaped at the ideas that thronged into his cluttered mind. Maybe his set, by some odd circuiting, could induce broadcast television signals directly on the mind! Maybe he had invented an instrument for facilitating telepathy. Maybe he had stumbled on something altogether new and unheard of. Any way you looked at it, there was millions in it. Piker, he told himself, there’s billions in it!
“Nah,” said Farrel. His face blanched; like many a bovine character before him he suddenly realized he had swallowed his cud.
“Don’t worry about it,” said the observant Donzey. “Chewing gum won’t hurt you. Chew some more and forget it. Now, about those pictures—”
“Them … they wasn’t like television. They wasn’t like nothin’ I ever heard about before. They were colored pictures—”
“Moving pictures?”
“Oh, yeah. But they were all foggy. Things close to me, they were clear. Anything more’n thirty feet away was—fuzzy.”
“Like a camera out of focus?”
“Um. But things ‘way far away, they were clear as a bell.”
“What did you see?”
“Hills—fields. I didn’t recognize that part of the country. But it all looked different. The grass was green, but sort of gray, too. An’ the sky was just—blank. It all seemed good. I dunno—you won’t laugh at me, Donzey?” asked the sheriff suddenly.
“Good gosh no!”
“Well, I was—eatin’ the grass!” Farrel peered timidly at the mechanic and then seemed reassured. “It was queer. I couldn’t figure time at all. I don’t know how long it went on—might ’a’ been years. Seemed like it was raining sometimes. Sometimes it was cold, an’ that didn’t bother me. Sometimes it was hot, and boy, that did.”
“Are you telling me you felt things in those pictures?”
Farrel nodded soberly. “Donzey, I was in those pictures.”
Donzey thought, What have I got here? Transmigration? Teleportation? Clairvoyance? Why, there’s ten billion in it!
“What got me,” said Farrel thoughtfully, “was that everything seemed so good. Until the end. There was miles of alleys, like, and then a great big dark building. I was scared, but everyone else seemed to be going my way, so I went along. Then some feller with a … a cleaver, he … I tried to get away, but I couldn’t. He hit me. I hollered.”
“I’ll say you did.” They shuddered together for a moment.
“That’s all,” said Farrel. “He hit me twice, and I woke up on the floor with a busted wing and saw you all mixed up with the radio. Now you tell me—what happened?”
“You seemed to go into a kind of trance. You hollered, and then started thrashing around. You did a high-dive onto the deck an’ dragged the radio off the table. I caught it an’ my chin hit it where it was hot. It knocked me silly. The whole thing didn’t last twenty seconds.”
“Donzey,” said the sheriff, standing up, “you can keep the money I put into this thing. I don’t want no more of it.” He went to the door. “Course, if you should make a little money, don’t forget who helped you get a start.”
Donzey laughed. “I’ll keep in touch with you,” he said. “Look—about that big building you went into. You said you were scared, but everybody else was going the same way, so you went along. What were the others like?”
Farrel looked at him searchingly. “Did I say ‘everybody else’?”
“You did.”
“That’s funny.” Farrel scratched his head with his u
nbandaged arm. “All the rest of ’em was—sheep.” And he went out.
For a long time after Farrel had gone, Donzey sat and stared at the radio. “Sheep,” he muttered. He got up and set the transmitter carefully back on the table, rapidly checking over the wiring and tubes to see that all was safe and unbroken. “Sheep?” he asked himself. What had an FM radio to do with sheep? He put away his pliers and sal ammoniac and solder and flux; hung his friction tape on its peg; picked up the soldering iron by the point and was reminded that it was still plugged in. He looked down at his scorched palm. “Sheep!” he said absently.
It wasn’t anything you could just figure out, like what made an automobile engine squeak when you ran it more than two hundred miles without any oil, or why most of the lift comes from the top surface of an airplane’s wing. It was something you had to try out, like getting drunk or falling in love. Donzey switched on the radio, sat down and picked up the headset. As he adjusted the crownpiece back down to man-size, he was struck by an ugly thought. Farrel had been in a bad way when he was inside this headset. He was—dreaming, was it?—that some guy was striking him with a cleaver just as he lurched forward and cut the juice. Suppose he hadn’t cut it—would he have died, like the … the sheep he thought he was?
Donzey lay the earphones down and went into the bedroom for his alarm clock. Bolting it to the table, he wrapped a cord around the alarm key and led it to the radio switch. Then he set it carefully, so it would go off in one minute and turn off the set. He put on the headset, waited twenty-five seconds, and turned it on. Fifteen seconds to warm up, and then—
It happened for him, too, that gray grass and blank sky, the timelessness, the rain, the cold, the heat, and the sheep. The—other sheep. He ate the grass and it was good. He was frightened and milled with the others through those alleyways. He saw the dark building. He—and the alarm shrilled, the set clicked off, and he sat there sweating, a-tremble. This was bad. Oh, but bad.
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