They reached her gate. Joe said, “That’s the craziest story I ever heard.”
She reached behind her, opened the gate, slid through and closed it between them. “Well … goodnight, Joe. Thanks for the show and all.” She turned and went up the steps. At the top she looked back and saw him still standing there. She said good night again and when he didn’t answer she went into the house.
At the click of the door Joe started, took a step toward the gate. There was something so very final about the click; it left him alone, and it told him what he hadn’t known until then—that he didn’t want to be alone. He stared at the lighted windows for a moment, and finally shrugged. “That dame,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. He turned and started downtown.
“I guess I shoulda pasted that guy one,” he muttered. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. In the back of his mind, a most intimate possession of his, a sort of private movie projector, began reeling off a new feature, in technicolor. He saw himself in the bar, striding up to the table, a thin smile on his merciless lips. Gordon looked up and turned pale. “Well, wise guy?” said Joe out of the corner of his mouth. Gordon said, “Now, looka, a joke’s a joke, huh?” Joe slowly extended his hand. Gordon said, “Okay, okay,” and put the change from Joe’s ten into it. Joe put the money in his pocket and stood there rocking on the balls of his feet, -staring Gordon down. “Punk!” he spat. Bette rose and ran to him and threw her arms around him. “Don’t hit him, Joe!” Joe gently disengaged her and shoved her carelessly aside.
Fadeout.
Joe took his hands out of his pockets and walked a little faster.
Another reel. Joe and Gordon standing toe to toe, slugging it out. Bette shouting, “Come on, Joey!” A right, a left, another right, and Gordon was down, blood streaming from his nose and mouth. “Oh, Joe, my Joe …” and as he turned to face her and the hot promise of her parted lips, he saw too late that the coward on the floor had a gun. Blam! But with the explosion, Bette’s tear-filled face was blanked out by the superimposed picture of a kid sitting in a swirl of smoke under the muzzle of a cannon, digging his hands into the dirt and crying.
Joe shook his head in annoyance. He tried to get a close-up of Bette, whose dress was torn somehow, saying, “You’ve killed him, you rat! You’ve killed my Joe!”—flinging herself down beside him as he gasped his life out; but it couldn’t jell.
Gordon, he thought bitterly. Gordon is the guy who grins when he fights. A tough guy. Smack him one in the nose. He grins. When the noon gun goes off, he grins. Pump him full of lead, and he cracks wise with the Army nurse. The blonde Army nurse.
I’ll get him out on the fill where I’m working, Joe thought. I’ll be up on my dozer, and I’ll run him down. I’ll slap her in sixth gear. Just a touch on the steering clutches. He can’t dodge me. I got twenty-one tons at my fingertips. Blade him under. Lock a track and spin him into the dirt and spread him out and backblade him into nothing but a stain in the mud. In technicolor again, he pictured himself up on the machine, approaching the bar. He dropped his blade and swung into the front of the building. Blam! But instead of people running and screaming, instead of chrome-pipe chairs bouncing and scattering off the blade, instead of a sweaty Gordon crying, “He brought his bulldozer!” there was just the kid under the gun again, crying without trying to wipe his face.
“I got to do it,” Joe said suddenly in a strained voice. He thought, what right have I to horn in on them? and replied instantly, I can just ask for my change.
Ahead of him the lurid neon over the bar made the street and housefronts alternately blood and black, blood and black. He crossed over toward it and stumbled on the curbstone. His heart was pounding so hard that he had to catch his breath in between beats. He went in.
There were not many people left. He thought suddenly, maybe they’ve gone. He craned his neck toward the booths and instantly saw Bette’s beacon of hair.
He wiped his palms on the sides of his trousers. The waitress was behind the bar. Maybe she’d have the change. Maybe he wouldn’t have to ask Gordon at all. He went over to her. She looked tireder than she had before.
“I gave you ten dollars for a Cuba libre and a Coke a while back,” he said. “I was sitting over there. Have you got the change?”
“Oh—you’re the feller ordered and then went out. Was that your ten? I give the change to your friend there. Ask him about it.”
“Thanks.” Joe swallowed. “I—I guess I will.” He looked at the waitress. She was numbly mopping the bar with a grey towel. “I’ll go ask him about it right now.” It didn’t seem to make any difference to her; she just went on mopping. “Yes,” said Joe. “Well, thanks.”
He walked away from the bar. Maybe he ought to have a little drink first. As the thought occurred to him it was canceled by a reaction against any more stalling that jolted him to his ankles. He was trembling ever so slightly, all over, when he walked back to the booths.
I’ll just say “Hi,” easy-like, he told himself. But when he got there he couldn’t say anything at all. He put his hands down on the table and leaned on them. He looked at Gordon and wished that little muscle in his cheek would stop twitching.
“Well, will you look what crept in!” said Gordon. “What do you want?”
“My money,” whispered Joe. He cleared his throat. “My money,” he said.
“You lose some money?” Gordon nudged Bette. “He lost his money.”
“Better forget it, kid,” said Bette.
Joe said, “I left ten dollars here to pay for drinks.”
“That’s your hard luck,” said Gordon. “I don’t know nothing about it. Why’n’t you save yourself some bad trouble and beat it?
“Give it to me.”
“Look, son—ain’t it worth ten bucks to you to keep me from feeding you your teeth? How’re you gonna prove anything?”
Joe was suddenly certain that his mouth would form just one more statement before it dried up altogether. He said the only thing that would come into his mind. “Give it to me.”
Gordon carefully and ostentatiously adjusted his heavy signet ring. Joe became fearfully aware of what that big ring could do. “I guess I gotta give it to him,” said Gordon. He got up and stepped so close to Joe that Joe could smell the liquor on his breath. “Now get outta here,” rasped Gordon. He put his open palm against Joe’s face and shoved.
Joe stepped backwards, his arms flailing for balance, until his knees brought up against a chair, and he fell over it backwards and crashed to the floor on his head and shoulders. He rolled over and tried to get up. Gordon stepped over and kicked him in the stomach, and when he put his hands down, kicked him in the head.
It made a noise inside his head like nothing he had ever heard. Just blam! and then the whole world was full of roiling smoke. It began to clear, and he became conscious of a bleating noise—the waitress. He raised his head and looked past the thick columns of Gordon’s legs, and saw Bette’s face. She was not saying, “Oh, Joe, my Joe …” She was smiling, with her mouth half open. He could see almost all her upper teeth. She was smiling at Gordon.
Gordon stepped back as he got to his knees and then to his feet. “You kicked me,” he said inanely, and then rushed.
He felt his hands close around Gordon’s forearms. They felt almost squashy in his grip. He forgot all about dream-fights, movie and TV fights, the one-two, the feint and duck and right cross. He bent Gordon’s arms until the square hands were fluttering under the baby chin, and he bore down with all the power that ten hours a day pulling steering clutches can give. Gordon went to his knees. “Money,” said Joe. He pulled Gordon back on his feet, released his arms, grabbed a handful of hair and hauled Gordon’s head back until he could see the skin on the pink throat stretching. Holding him like that, he swung at Gordon’s jaw, cheek, nose, eye, mouth, jaw. He kept swinging until Bette screamed. Then he let go, and Gordon came down and over and around his feet like something dumped out of a truck.
&
nbsp; The waitress was saying, “Stop it! Stop it!” Joe said, to his own astonishment, “You stop it. You’re making all the racket,” and went over to Bette. “I want my money,” he said.
“I got it,” she said. “Gosh, Joe, we were only having fun with you.” She opened her pocketbook and took out a ten, the whole ten, and put it on the table. Joe picked it up and slid it into his wallet, and took out a dollar and gave it to the waitress. “Throw some water on him,” he said.
Bette looked at the feebly stirring figure on the floor. “You didn’t need to get mad like that,” she said. “Now when he comes to he’s going to take it out on me. I’m gettin’ out of here.” She walked off.
Joe found his hat, picked it up, dusted it off, put it on. Bette was waiting for him outside on the sidewalk. The blinking neon did strange things to the color of her hair.
“Are you going my way?” she asked him, holding his arm.
“What’s your way?”
She pointed. He shook his head. She said, “I could go the other way.”
He took her hand off his arm. “I got a date,” he said.
His head hurt.
He went straight to Sara Nell’s house, thinking about what he should say when he saw her. He thought up plenty, but when he stood in the light of her opened door, he forgot it all and said only, “I got the money. They had it, all right.”
“Joe! You’re hurt!”
“I feel fine.” How she got into his arms he couldn’t imagine. He held her close and stroked her hair. She didn’t turn her face away. His eyes were hot. He said, “You’re so little! You’re no bigger’n a little old mouse. I oughta call you Mousie.”
She said, “All right, Joe.”
He held her close, but he was careful, because his arms were so strong he didn’t want to hurt her.
Bulldozer Is a Noun
IN SPITE OF the resilient walls and acoustabsorbing floors, Jay Scanlon’s startled “What?” carried through four different offices, causing three typing errors, one inadvertent subtotal and two cases of mild profanity. The erg-per-worker meter on his desk, wired to every business machine in the place, chalked up eighteen man-minutes lost time, divided that by the number of office employees, and advanced the quitting-time gong relays by two-tenths of a second.
“I’m sorry, Jay,” said Pellit. He unfolded out of his chair and helped himself to a cigarette, which he struck on his thumbnail. “We’ve got to have the guy, and on his terms. There isn’t any other way out.”
Jay’s contorted features relaxed into their usual expression of undershot wistfulness. “It’s not right. It’s—sacreligious, practically. The man’s an iconoclast. This is a technological culture and has been for the past three thousand years. I’ll admit the necessity for going back to techniques that were in use practically in the dawn of time, but I don’t see where we can’t get along without a crackpot who says right out loud that he’d rather live in the past.”
“Yeah, he talks too much. But he’s a topnotch researcher. Universal Synthetics has come a long way by its policy of buying, making, and hiring the best. And he’s the best there is.”
Jay snorted. He pointed at his unlovely but appealing head and said, “See that face? That’s the best I’ve got too. For the same reason. Sure he’s the best. There’s no other human on the three planets who is crazy enough to have wasted his whole life in digging up useless information. It’s—it’s—” he searched for the strongest word he could find, lowered his voice to be sure the stenos couldn’t hear him, and said, “It’s inefficient!”
Pellit started. “Please, Jay. It doesn’t call for foul language. The trend of events has proved that his work is of some use, or we wouldn’t be seeing him this afternoon.”
Jay sighed. “I know. I know. But he couldn’t have known of that. Not thirty years ago when he started burrowing in the Archives. It’s unplanned, don’t you see? It’s sinful! What’s funny?”
Pellit turned loose the smile that had been puckering his cheeks. “I can’t help it, Jay. The beautiful paradox! The complete stasis of progress! Onward and Upward—that’s what we’ve been fed since we were children, and ninety generations before us. We’ve lived by it and worked by it, and we have progressed. We’re moving onward and upward all right, but at such a uniform rate that we’re completely hidebound. As a unit we progress; within the unit we’re in complete and utter stasis. By going backward to the Metal Age techniques in this thing, our social unit takes a big jump upward, but within it violates all our conventions, and we throw up our hands in holy horror like a pack of Monday-school teachers finding a steam-engine on the Altar at Willow Run Sanctuary.”
“It isn’t funny. And you’re almost as bad as Mauritius the Drip … why does he call himself that, anyway?”
“Oh, some idea of his that he feels identifies him with his work. ‘Drip’ was a widely used term back there somewhere in the umpteenth century, so he says; a widely used descriptive term of a typical period in which he considers himself an expert. Ask him about it.”
“What’d it describe?”
“He claims that all the great men of the pre- Fourth and Last era were called drips at one time or another—the peace-making statesmen, the theoretical scientists, the advanced artists, and so on. So he figures he’s a drip too.”
“The guy should have a number,” Jay said glumly. “All right; send him in.”
The Anson dilator in the wall opposite opened, adding a cubicle of the waiting compartment to Jay’s office. Mauritius the Drip was not sitting in the luxurious chair provided but was on the floor with his feet on the seat and his back to the wall. “In protest,” he explained, indicating his pose, “as I must protest all of the artificialities of this effeminate culture.”
Jay stared open-mouthed at the lanky apparition, with its rough beard-stubble, its anachronistic clothes, its long bony face on which was mounted an antediluvian pair of eye-lenses in thick mottled-amber frames. “What,” said Jay with something like horror in his voice, “is that?”
“Mauritius the Drip,” said Pellit. “This is Jay Scanlon.”
“No, no,” said Jay. “I mean all that—on his face.”
Mauritius ran the edge of a thumbnail raspingly down his cheek. “That,” he said hollowly, “is a beer. Every normal male would have one were it not for the effect of your ridiculous Rites of pubertescence, where the skin of the face is irradiated in the name of efficiency.”
“Oh yes,” said Pellit suddenly. “I seem to have heard of a legend to that effect. In the pre- Fourth and Last era that facial pilosity was cultivated by scratching with a sharp blade, wasn’t it? they called it ‘raising with a shaver,’ didn’t they?”
“You have been studious,” said Mauritius loftily, “but careless. Your sources were at fault. It wasn’t ‘raising with a shaver,’ but ‘shaving with a razor.’ A razor was the instrument used, and must have been the object meant by repeated references in the contemporary press to ‘a check for a short beer.’ ”
“An expert was what I asked for,” mourned Jay, “and an expert was what I got. Is there any possibility that we can get down to business?”
“Yes,” said the Drip. “What is it that caused you irreverent progressives to summon me?”
“Irreverent,” wailed Jay. The customary pathos in his face dissolved into a grieved sort of numbness. “Irreverent! And who’s talking?”
Mauritius the Drip uncoiled and stood up, startlingly tall. “Yes, irreverent!” he said, stalking across to Jay’s desk. “Look at me! What am I, besides the greatest antiquarian on the three planets?” He flung out a bony forefinger. “A true representative of a race, and faithful to it—all of it. What are you? A piddling example of a passing phase. Who, presented to an impartial interstellar being, would be the truest example of our genus—you, who glance lightly at today and concentrate forever on tomorrow and tomorrow—or I—” (every time the Drip used the nominative pronoun he got a quarter of an inch taller) “who live and think and wo
rk in everything humanity is and has been in seven thousand years? You, who base your faith on logic—does this logic tell you you have seven thousand years of future to back up your faith?”
“You spit when you talk,” said Jay.
Pellit raised his fists to his temples and pounded softly. “Business, for heaven’s sake, business.… Jay, whittle that stuff away and let’s get down to it.”
Mauritius the Drip turned to Pellit. “That,” he said, “is a very interesting phrase. Would you like to know its origin?”
“No.”
“It is derived from the name of the man who first developed jet propulsion for aircraft, a Captain George Whittle; the colloquial phrase referred to ‘whittling down distances’ because of the vast increase in speed that was then possible. Date, about nineteen sixty, toward the close of the Second War. The phrase, like everything else, has been corrupted since those noble days.”
“Fascinating,” mourned Jay Scanlon. “I find this whole conversation unproductive, to say the very least. I am sorry to say that we need your services. Would you care to have me say something further about it?”
“Jay,” said Pellit frantically, reading the signs, “Don’t throw him out!”
“I can’t,” moaned Jay, his eyes fixed on the erg-per-worker meter as if it were some sort of triptych. “Mauritius, we need your advices on a matter concerning which you just might be able to help us.”
“That is self-evident, or I wouldn’t be here. You’re wasting time,” said the Drip.
“Your fault,” said Jay. “I never saw anything like it. You radiate procrastination.” He drew a deep breath, and, rocking sideways in his chair, sat on his hands. Pellit grinned at him sympathetically.
“We are building a ship,” said Jay, his sad voice quivering with enforced gentleness. “Interstellar, but big. The biggest thing that man has ever built. The keel is being laid in mile-long sections in Chicago Center and is being floated out into Lake Michigan as each deadrise bilge-plate is fitted. Floating it saves us thousands of cradling operations. The superstructures are being added to the floating section. Except for electrical, electronic, and magnetronic installations, the ship will be entirely built of synthetics.”
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