The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Edited by The Playboy Editors

  Not even for romance, especially not for romance. The first real date I had with Delia, we parked the car out on Dame’s Point. There was no moon and the inside of the car was a dark and cozy cave. Inside of fifteen minutes matters had progressed to where no further progress could be made—not without a marriage license. And on our honeymoon, not only was the Moon away on a seventy-two-hour pass, but the rain beat softly on the roof, the lovingest sound a newlywed couple ever heard.

  The Moon and Delia, then Delia and the Moon, my mind swung from one to the other, and there was no way out. There are only two things I know to do about a problem—solve it or take a snooze and forget it. There was no solution to this one, so I closed my eyes and began the long, sweet dive into the great big nothing where there are no problems.

  And I heard somebody somewhere say, clearly and distinctly, “Friend, remember Peralonzo Niño.”

  “I don’t see how in hell I can,” I said. “How can I remember somebody I never heard of?”

  I opened my eyes. The room was much dimmer—a rain cloud obscuring the sun, I figured. Marco or Johnny was sitting in the easy chair by the window, and I started to say “I told you to stay the hell out of here,” and then I saw the beard and knew it wasn’t either of them.

  He spoke before I did. “I am Peralonzo Niño,” he said.

  “By golly, you certainly are,” I said. I saw no reason to doubt him. He was a small, spare fellow, with eyes as sad as a jilted spaniel.

  He leaned forward. “Today we sail,” he said. “We sail on an ocean of nothing, toward nothing, on the word of a fool whose arithmetic is poor beyond belief.”

  “What are you talking about, buddy?” I said. “And how in hell did you get past the guards?”

  He shrugged and spread his hands. “We sail on the hour,” he said. “On the hour, I kiss Mercedes farewell, and already she is big with child. If I could choose I would choose not to go, but I am not given the choice. My mind was troubled and I went to sleep and I heard a voice say, ‘Think of Abner Evans,’ and I woke up.”

  I raised up on one elbow. “What do you do, Peralonzo, when you’re working?” I asked and knew the answer before he told me.

  “I am Peralonzo Niño of Palos,” he said with great dignity. “And against my will and better judgment, I am the pilot of the Santa Maria.”

  “Well, hell, buddy,” I said. “I used to have an old bat of a history teacher, Miss Dunstable, and she used to yap about how brave and absolutely fearless you guys were to sail those little beat-up cockleshells across an unknown ocean.”

  He spat. “Miss Dunstable, then, is a bigger fool than Colon. And the Santa Maria is no cockleshell, but the finest ship afloat. But I am not brave. I am a sailor, and this ocean is beyond my knowledge and I am afraid I will never return to Mercedes, who is my life, my soul.”

  I started in to tell him that he had no problem, that voyage across the Atlantic was a big success, but stopped.

  “Peralonzo, buddy, I’m sorry but I don’t know,” I said. “I was just in the middle third of my class at John Gorrie Junior High, and I’ve forgotten nine tenths of the little bit I learned.”

  I was ashamed. He was a nice guy, fouled up with History with a capital H, just like I was, and I couldn’t help him any more than he could help me. I knew that Columbus had made it across the Atlantic and back, but for all I knew Peralonzo’s bones were buried on San Salvador or on the bottom of the ocean.

  So I did the only thing I could do. I told him where I was going. I told him to help him, to show him that compared to my voyage, his was just nothing, just nowhere at all. When I had finished he nodded his head.

  “We stew in the same pot,” he said. “But you have the advantage. You know where you are going and what you will encounter. And Hanrahan’s arithmetic is better.”

  “Well, hell, it’s no lead-pipe cinch,” I said, but I couldn’t argue with this guy. “You’re right, Peralonzo, it’s the same damned mess.”

  “Because there is Delia,” he said, and yawned. “Senor, if you return, kiss her for me, and call her Mercedes.”

  “And if you return, give Mercedes a smooch, and call her Delia,” I said. The yawn was contagious. “So long, Peralonzo, and good luck, kid.”

  From a long way off, I heard him sigh and say, “Vaya con Dios, senor.”

  I was not sorry to go back to sleep. Peralonzo was a good egg, I enjoyed talking to him, and I wondered how he made out back there in 1492. But everything was getting fuzzy and blurry and I let it go.

  Then Delia said, “Why don’t you bring me a bunch of flowers from the Moon? You know I like flowers.”

  “Delia, there ain’t any damned flowers on the Moon,” I said. “It’s just a bunch of rock and rubble and green cheese.”

  “Oh, ipskiddy, ickyrah,” she said. “I’ll bet pocket handkerchiefs grow up there. They’ll grow anywhere.”

  “Is a pocket handkerchief a flower?” I asked.

  “Is a snapdragon an animal?” she asked.

  Putting it that way, it seemed reasonable, and I could see the fields of pocket handkerchiefs, snowy white with blue borders and tiny monograms in one corner. It would be a lot of trouble looking for Ds, but Delia was worth it.

  “OK, Mercedes,” I said. “I’ll bring you a yard of them.”

  She began to shake me. “Wake up, Abner. What are you talking about? Who is this Mercedes woman, anyway?”

  I opened my eyes. She was sitting on the bed by me. A flourish of trumpets and a rapid tattoo of drums struck up inside me, as always, when I see that Delia.

  “Delia, if you are another dream, go away,” I said.

  She took my hands and put them where it felt good. “Are these dreams?” she asked. I couldn’t think of a better way to establish a fact.

  “How’d you get here?” I asked after I had done my duty and my pleasure, kissing those two brown eyes and that Delia-flavored mouth.

  “Oh, the Navy has a heart,” she said. “Deeply buried under mountains of red tape, but it’s there.” She pushed me away from her. “I’ve just come from talking to Hanrahan. It looks like I’m married to a hero.”

  “No, kid,” I said, “Columbus and Hanrahan are the heroes. Me and Peralonzo are a couple of guys they need to do what they want to do.” I told her about my dream, if that was what it was—I don’t think it was, exactly, but I didn’t know what else to call it.

  “I always thought Old Lady Dunstable had the wrong dope,” I said, when I got through. And I looked at her sadly. “Blast and damn, Delia,” I almost cried, “how can I leave a world with you in it?”

  She got up and walked over to the window. She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Oh, you’re just like all the sailors I ever heard of,” she said. “Get a girl knocked up and then leave town.”

  I didn’t get it, and then I did. I went into free fall, dropping down mile upon mile. After what seemed like years, I came out of it and walked across the room and put my hands on her brave shoulders and turned her around.

  “Lady, you would not kid?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “This is no drill, Abner,” she said.

  “How long have you known?” I asked.

  “I guess I’ve known at least a couple of weeks,” she said. “It wasn’t official until this morning. But Dr. Hurlburt says there’s no doubt about it.”

  “Well, girl,” I said, “are you sad, mad, or glad?”

  “I feel like a big trap has snapped shut on me,” she said. “And I feel very foolish and very angry with myself, as if I’d done something dumb or careless. And I feel like I’ve been crowned Queen of the May. I guess I feel like a woman instead of a girl all of a sudden, and I’m not used to it.” She was talking very fast. “But what about you? What do you think about being a papa?”

  I had thoughts but no words so I did the only thing I knew to do. I hugged her close and kissed her for a long time and patted her on the fanny. I was very grateful that she did not need more than this to reassur
e her. And as I kissed her I heard the siren but let it scream on until I had finished the kiss.

  To the Moon, Old Hanrahan had said, we needed a man who not only would go to the Moon but who damned well would want to get back. Oh, he was a wise one, that Hanrahan, watching Marco, watching Johnny, watching me, until he knew his man. And this morning, Delia, like all Navy wives, had availed herself of the free medical attention at the base clinic. And when Hurlburt called Hanrahan and told him Delia was pregnant, that was it.

  That was it. Marco and Johnny could fly it there, as well as I could. But I had the best, the most, the strongest reason to get back.

  Delia and I walked out of the room, into the sunshine. Marco and Johnny were waiting, but it no longer mattered, I didn’t want to change places with them.

  “We’ll see you two o’clock, next week,” Johnny said, “and we’ll pitch a triple whingding.”

  Marco said, “Vaya con Dios.” He said it very well. Not as well as Peralonzo, as he could not put as much meaning into it, but it was good to hear.

  I took Delia by the hand to cut across the quad to the briefing room. Marco and Johnny fell in behind us. In a few minutes I would say what I had to say, and Delia would say what she had to say. We would hold each other in a brief lather of misery and then I’d let her go. After that, letting loose from gravity would be no problem.

  Peralonzo, old buddy, I thought, as voyagers we are pikers, stay-at-homes. I thought about the birds and the bees and the hard, stubby facts of life. About all the millions and millions of spermatozoa making the voyage from testes to ovum, all of them perishing save one tiny voyager. A doctor once told me that comparatively speaking, the journey must be, can only be, measured in millions of miles. And Peralonzo had made that journey, and so had I. And I knew that Peralonzo returned, and I knew that Abner Evans would make it also.

  On the way we passed the mimosa tree, and the little brown bird was still there. You could hardly call the sound he made singing—to tell the truth, he couldn’t carry a tune any better than I could—but he was, as Peralonzo had done and as I was going to do, giving it everything he had.

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  ~ * ~

  THE NOISE

  BY KEN W. PURDY

  Prior to becoming playboy’s most prolific Contributing Editor, Ken W. Purdy held the top editorial posts at True and Argosy. He is a respected authority on the men and machines of the automotive world (his books on that world include “Bright Wheels Rolling.,” “Kings of the Road,” “The Wonderful World of the Automobile” and “All But My Life,” a volume of chats with Stirling Moss), and is a three-time winner of playboy Awards—once for fiction, twice for nonfiction. Purdy’s prose is contemporaneous and brisk, as hard and clear and bright as a diamond; his dialog has the crack and sting of a blacksnake whip. “The Noise,” a story of a man suddenly invested with a dangerous mental power, is the work of a super-skilled pro at the top of his form.

  ~ * ~

  DR. KABAT looked at Barnaby Hackett with the calm, masked gaze of the psychiatrist.

  “You’ve told me a great deal in a very short time, Mr. Hackett,” he said, “and I may say I have rarely heard so complex a matter so lucidly stated. One thing you didn’t tell me: when did you first notice this phenomenon?”

  “The first time I noticed it I did tell you,” Hackett said. “That was when I was in the second grade in Kill’s Bluff, when Miss Grench had Tommy Barstow bent over the desk and she was beating him with the pointer and suddenly I knew what she was thinking. That was the first time I noticed it. But my mother told me that when I was 18 months old my nurse noticed it. She said she was standing there watching me and she said to herself, ‘If that child throws another spoon of Pablum on the floor I’m going to belt him one good lick.’ I threw up my arms in front of my face and began to cry. Mercy-Helen, that was the nurse, was very upset by it. She never had hit me, never would.”

  “I see,” Dr. Kabat said. “Then you noticed it first when you were seven. Now you are 32 and you feel that the faculty is strengthening. Or that the sensitivity is increasing. Or at any rate that the frequency of the phenomenon is increasing.”

  “That’s right,” Hackett said. “It used to happen perhaps once a week. Then it became two and three times a week, then every day, then a couple of times a day, usually these were unusual incidents, small but striking things, like I told you, maybe I’d be trying to get a girl to go to bed with me; she’d be saying no and all of a sudden I’d hear her talking to herself telling herself what she was going to do when she was in bed with me, things like that, and then it became more and more frequent, and six months ago the whole thing began to accelerate until now I can’t differentiate between incidents at all, it happens constantly and steadily and all the time, and the worst part of it is what I call the static, the unregistered stuff--”

  “Let me interrupt you,” Dr. Kabat said. “The word ‘unregistered’?”

  “I mean bits and pieces. It’s getting so I can’t stand to walk down the street. To come here today, for example, I walked down Fifth Avenue from 59th Street to here, four blocks, and that’s not the most crowded part of Fifth either, but I only just made it. What I want to do, I want to scream as loudly as I can, just in the hope that if I do that I won’t hear the unregistered bits, the fragments, the half-thoughts and half-sentences. They’re the worst, you see. And it’s very loud, that it’s always been, very loud, like a radio turned right up all the way, whole pieces or unregistered, and of course I remember everything, as I told you, I never forget anything. I have absolute recall, so when I walk down the street I have to hear, and store away, stuff like this, and I’ll just shout it at you because I want you to know how it actually is with me, CAR ISN’T A BLACK ONE I KNOW I’M . . . TAKE HIS GODDAM TWO BITS . . . TOYS NOT LIKE WHEN I WAS YOUNG THEN . . . LOOK AT THE SET OF JUGS ON THAT BLONDE ... NO HE NEVER DID GRADUATE THAT YEAR OR MARIE . . . $29.75 IS HOW MUCH IF ... TO PAINT LIKE THAT PAINTING SHE . . . ROOM 308 ROOM 308 ROOM . . . ANYWAY HE’LL DIE BEFORE . . . SON OF A BITCH TRIED TO . . . GOD OUR FATHER INTERCEDE IN THIS . . . I’LL NEVER MAKE IT L’LL NEVER I CAN’T HELLO TOM I . . . DON’T WIN THEM ... IF I DON’T FIND A PLACE TO PEE ... HE ALWAYS DID HATE ROASTS BUT SHE OH SHE . . . ALL RIGHT SO I’M A LOUSE THE LOWEST THE WORST BUT BY JESUS I WON’T . . .”

  Dr. Kabat lifted his hand. “I understand,” he said. “I see how it is. Yes.”

  Barnaby Hackett shook his head slowly. He was sitting on the end of his spine in the soft leather chair, looking up at Kabat. His eyes were luminous and brown, light brown, a tawny shade, he was blond. It was a pleasant face, lean, almost bony.

  “No,” he said, “you don’t really, Doctor, because I have to give them to you one at a time. You can’t appreciate the full effect that way. You see, for me they all pile in at once, on top of each other, sentences shouting out every which way like a pile of straw, or sticks, spears, I usually think of, spears, guns, with bayonets piled up, something like that, you have to understand that distance is the governing factor apparently, I think about 15 or 16 feet, I don’t receive beyond that, but within 15 or 16 feet I get it all at once and . . .”

  “I understand,” Kabat said. “Very painful, obviously.”

  Neither of them spoke.

  “Still there must have been times when the faculty was useful to you,” Dr. Kabat said. “The example you mentioned, the girl you wanted to go to bed with. It was helpful there: you knew you were going to succeed, even though she was saying no.”

  “That’s true,” Hackett said. “As long as it was intermittent, I didn’t mind it, I enjoyed it. It’s only the increasing frequency that has me frightened.”

  “I should think it would be very handy in business,” Dr. Kabat said. “What is your business, by the way?”

  “Automobiles,” Hackett said. “I started out as a car salesman, and of course I always knew which was a shopper and which was a hot prospect, and so I made a lot of money. I bought the business in a couple of year
s. Now I’ve got a whole chain of dealerships all up and down the East Coast: Volkswagen, Renault, FIAT, Jag, MG, SAAB—only the good ones. My faculty, as you call it, was an advantage in business, sure, but now I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need, and I can’t get myself interested in being a tycoon, you know, hotels, steamships, oil, all that jazz, I think people who get on that kick are sick-sick, one way or another.” He sat straight up in the chair. “Look, Dr. Kabat,” he said, “I was perfectly happy until about three months ago, when I began to hear more and more and now I hear everything—and something worse can happen.”

  “Worse?”

  Hackett nodded slowly and slid back down in the chair. “Worse,” he said, “and I tell you frankly, I’ll have to kill myself if it happens, and I think it is happening: I think my range is increasing. I told you the limit was around 15 or 16 feet. Well, yesterday I was walking in Central Park, that’s a good place for me, you see, lots of open space, and I sat down on a bench near the lake. After a while a cop came along and he stood for a minute looking out over the water. I began to pick him up, and I didn’t think anything of it, it was a very ordinary thing, he was giving himself a fantasy about how one of Mayor Wagner’s kids was skating there in the winter and fell in and he rescued the kid and they made him a first-grade detective right on the spot, a real dull bit, and he went away almost at once, but then slowly I realized he’d been a longish way from the bench, I got up and paced it off, and it came out at a little more than 18 feet, maybe almost 19, and then I remembered a couple of other things like that, and I do think I’m picking them up farther away now. Well, if this increases as fast as the rest of it has I’ll be reading them half a mile away pretty soon, and you understand no mind could stand that, that’s when I’ll have to go, because remember that would be a radius of half a mile or whatever, I don’t read them just in front or in back of me, but all around, and if you just think for a minute of standing, say, by the flower beds in Radio City and getting every thought within half a mile, that would run I should think, easily it would run 100,000 people in that circle, every one of them putting out a solid stream of crap steadily every second, because even the dumbest brass-head you ever knew thinks; what he thinks might curl the hair on a musk-ox, but he thinks; it’s going on in there all the time, and . . .” Hackett’s eyes suddenly spread wide, his eyelids popped like window shades run up and he pressed both hands into his head and began to moan and he swung his body back and forth in the chair.