The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Edited by The Playboy Editors

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Hackett said. He hung his jacket on the back of the chair. He threw himself down on the couch. “Let’s not waste any time,” he said. “Nothing but hypnosis has done any good so far, and if there’s a solution that’s where it lies.”

  “You know,” Kabat said softly, “you could go away. You could go say to Australia, in the outback . . .”

  “Nonsense,” Hackett said. “No man can live alone, truly alone. Besides, this thing is growing, a mile today, five next week, 15, 50 . . .” He folded his hands on his chest. “I’m ready now,” he said.

  Kabat held tight to the edge of his desk and stared hard at the wall across the room. No image, he told himself, not now, in this last minute. He began to speak softly. “Your eyelids are growing heavy,” he said. “Very heavy. You are becoming drowsy, very drowsy. And drowsier. And drowsier. You are going into a deep sleep. Very deep. A very deep sleep. And deep. And deep. And deep . . .”

  He stood by the window, looking down. There wasn’t a car moving, nor a human being. “Deep,” he said. “And deep . . . deep . . . deep . . .”

  He waited. Then he took the little box out of the drawer and dropped it into the pocket of Hackett’s coat. He let the time pass.

  “When you wake,” he said, “you will feel refreshed and happy. You will go directly to your apartment. You will hurry. You will hurry because you have something important to do when you get home. In the right-hand pocket of your jacket you will find six pills in a small plain box. You will take these pills, quickly, one after the other, with water. Then you will lie down. You will feel fine, relaxed, content. When you wake up now you will remember nothing of what I have said to you, nothing at all. You will hurry home, and when you get home you will reach in your pocket and you will find the pills. You will want to take them. You will take them quickly. I am going to count to five now, and any time after I reach the count of five you may wake up. One, two, three, four . . . five.”

  Hackett came slowly to his feet, rubbing his eyes as he always did. He stood up. He looked around the room. “I ought to give you a check today,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ll take the time . . . I’m in something of a hurry . . . I’ll see you tomorrow.” He opened the door and turned to nod.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Hackett,” Dr. Kabat said. “Goodbye.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE KILLER IN THE TV SET

  BY BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN

  “When I glanced at the very first sentence, I was filled with a fear that here was a story I would not be able to put down until I had read it through to the end. This proved to be true.” That comment by Joseph (“Catch-22”) Heller refers to Bruce Jay Friedman’s first novel, “Stern,” but it is perfectly applicable to “The Killer in the TV Set.” It is utterly outré fantasy that might have occurred to any writer watching the late-late show—except that it didn’t. It occurred to Bruce Jay Friedman, and that makes all the difference.

  ~ * ~

  AT FIRST, Mr. Ordz noticed only that the master of ceremonies or star of the television show wore a bad toupee, one that swept up suddenly and pointily like an Elks’ convention cap. It seemed to be a late-hour “talk” arrangement, leading off with a singer named Connie who did carefully-ticked-off rhythm gestures; one to connote passion, another, unabashed frivolity, and a third naïveté and first love. The show was one Mr. Ordz did not recognize, although this was beside the point since his main concern was to avoid going upstairs to Mrs. Ordz, a plump woman who had discovered sex in her early forties. In curlers, she waited each night for Mr. Ordz to come unravel her mysteries so that she might, in her own words, “fly out of control and yield forth the real me.” Mr. Ordz had had several exposures to the real her and now scrupulously ducked opportunities for others.

  Four male dancers came out now and surrounded the singer, flicking their fingers out toward her, and keeping up a chant that went “Isn’t she a doll?” then hoisting her up on their shoulders for the finale.

  “Doesn’t she just bash you over the head?” asked the m.c., pulling up a chair. The setting was spare, a simple wall with a chair or two lined up against it, much in the style of the “intellectual” conversation show. “I’d like to bash you over the head, too,” said the m.c., “but I can’t and I’ve got to get you some other way.” Mr. Ordz snickered, sending the snicker out through his nose. It was a laugh he used both for registering amusement and also slight shock, and it served the side function of clearing his nasal passages. “All right, now,” the m.c. said, “I used Connie to hook you, although I’ve no doubt I can keep you once you’re watching awhile. Hear me now and hear me good. I’ve got exactly one week to kill you or I don’t get my sponsor. Funny how you fall into these master-of-ceremony jokes just being up here in front of a camera and with all this television paraphernalia. Let me nail down that last remark a little better. I don’t mean kill you with laughter or entertainment. I mean really stop your heart, Ordz, for Christ’s sake, make you die. I’ve done work on you and I know I can do it.”

  Mr. Ordz thought the man had said “hard orbs” but then the m.c. said, “Heart, Ordz, stop your heart, Ordz. All right, then, Mr. Ordz. For Christ’s sake listen because I just told you I’ve only got a week.”

  Mr. Ordz turned the dial and watched test patterns which is all he could get at two in the morning. He looked at a two-week-old TV Guide and saw there was no listing for a panel show that hour on Tuesday morning and then he called the police. “I’m getting a crazy channel,” he said, “and wonder if you can come over and look at it.”

  “Wait till tomorrow morning and see if it goes away,” said the police officer. “We can’t just run out for you people.”

  “All right,” said Mr. Ordz, “but I never call the police and I’m really getting something crazy.”

  He went to bed then, tapping his wife gently on the shoulder and whispering, “I got something crazy on TV,” but when she heaved convulsively Mr. Ordz sneaked into the corner of the bed and pretended he wasn’t there.

  The following evening Mr. Ordz buried his head in a book on Scottish grottoes and read on late into the night, but when two in the morning came, he put aside the book and flipped on the television set. “It’ll be better if you put me on earlier,” said the m.c., wearing a loud checkered jacket and smiling without sincerity. “You’ll noodle around and put me on anyway, so why don’t you just put a man on. All right, here’s your production number, Ordz. I don’t see any point to doing them. It’s sort of like fattening up the calf, but I’m supposed to give you one a night for some damned reason.”

  The singer of the previous evening came out in a Latin American festival costume, clicking her fingers furiously and doing a rhythm number with lyrics that went “Vadoo, vadoo, vadoo vey. Hey, hey, hey, hey, vadoo vey.” She finished up with the word “Yeah” and did a deep, humble bow, and the m.c. said, “It’ll go hard if you turn me off. I don’t mean I can reach out and strike you down. That’s the thing I want to explain. I can’t shoot you from in here or give you a swift, punishing rabbit punch. It isn’t that kind of arrangement. In ours, I’ve got six days to kill you, but I’m not actually allowed to do it directly. Now, what I’m going to do is try to shake you up as best I can, Ordz, and get you to, say, go up to your room and have a heart attack. I don’t know whether you have heart trouble and another thing is I’m not allowed to ask you questions over this thing. But I have researched you, incidentally. It doesn’t matter whether I like you or not—the main thing is getting myself a sponsor—but I might as well tell you I don’t really care for you at all. You’re such a damned small person and your life is such a drag. Now I’m saying this half because I mean it, and, to be honest, half because I want to shake you up and see if I can bring on that heart attack. And now the news. The arrangement is I’m to bring you only flashes on airplane wrecks and major disasters. It was a compromise and I think I did well. At first I was supposed to give you politics, too.”

&
nbsp; Mr. Ordz watched the first one, some coverage of a DC-7 explosion in Paraguay and then switched off the show and called the police again. He got a different officer and said, “I called about the crazy television show last night.”

  “I don’t know who you got,” said the officer. “We get a lot of calls about television and can’t just come out.”

  “All right,” said Mr. Ordz, “but even though I called last night I don’t go around calling the police all the time.”

  The only one Mr. Ordz knew in television was his cousin, Raphael, who was an assistant technical director in video tape. He went to see Raphael during lunch hour the next day. It was a short interview.

  “I don’t think that’s any way to get a man,” said Mr. Ordz. “I can see a practical joke but I don’t think you should draw them out over a week. What if I did get a heart attack?”

  “What do you mean?” said Raphael, eating a banana. He was on a banana diet and took several along for his lunch hour.

  “The television set,” said Mr. Ordz. “What’s going on with it is what I mean.”

  “I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it,” said Raphael. “What are you so ashamed of? If you were a cloak and suiter, as a relative I’d come to you for jackets. I don’t see that any shame is involved. The real shame is beating around the bush. If your set is broken, I’ll fix it. It doesn’t matter that I work on the damned stuff all day long. You won’t owe me a thing. Buy me a peck of bananas and we’ll call it even. This is a lousy diet if you can’t kid yourself a little. And I can kid myself.”

  “You don’t understand what’s going on,” said Mr. Ordz, helplessly, “and I don’t have the energy to tell you.”

  He went back to his job and late that night, instead of making an effort to stay away, he flicked on the set promptly at two. The m.c. was wearing a Halloween costume. “All right, it’s Wednesday,” he said, “and the old . . .”

  Mr. Ordz cut the m.c. off in mid-sentence by turning the dial to another channel. He waited four or five minutes, feeling his heart beating and then getting nervous about it and squeezing his breast as though to slow it down. He turned back the dial and the m.c. continued the sentence, “. . . heart is still beating, but what you’ve got to remember is that . . .” Mr. Ordz flipped the dial again and waited roughly ten minutes this time, squeezing down his heart again, then flipped back and picked up the same sentence again: “. . . this thing is cumulative. It looks better for me, it’s more artistic, if I bring it off at the tail end of the week. Sort of build tension and then finish up the deal, finish you up that is, right under the wire. What’s that?”

  The m.c. cupped his hand to his ear and peered off into the wings, then said, “All right, Ordz, they tell me you’ve been fooling around with the dial and it shocks you that you can’t really miss a thing even if you switch off awhile. I don’t care if you’re shocked or not and the more shocks the better, although I’d rather you didn’t go till the end of the week.”

  Mr. Ordz stood up in front of the television set then and said, “I haven’t talked to you yet, but you’re getting me mad. It doesn’t mean a damned thing when I get mad unless I hit a certain plateau and then I don’t feel any pain. I’m not afraid of heart attacks then or doctors or punches in the mouth, and I can spit in death’s eye, too. It has no relation to my size or my weak wrists and abdomen. I’m just saying I’m mad now and when I am I’m suddenly articulate, fear no one and can get people. I don’t care where you are. You’ve just come in here and done this to me and I swear I’ll get you and I know I can do it because there are no obstacles when I feel this way.”

  “Calm down,” said the m.c., lighting a cigarette. “Just sit down. All right, I admit I’m a little rattled now but it doesn’t affect anything. I’m in a studio all right, but it’s cleverly disguised and no one in the world would guess where we’re set up. So all the anger in the world isn’t going to change anything. Just calm down awhile and you’ll see what I mean. Sing, Connie.”

  The hard-faced singer came out as a college coed in sweater and skirt. She pawed naively at the ground, waiting for the lift music and Mr. Ordz shouted, “And I don’t want to hear her either.”

  “Who told you?” said the m.c., rising in a panic. “That’s more work for me. You can’t keep a damned secret in television. All right, I suppose you know you can have three alternates. The Elbaya flamenco dancers, Orson’s Juggling Giants or Alonzo’s Acrobatorama.”

  “I’ll take the Acrobatorama,” said Mr. Ordz, shaking his fist at the set again. “But it doesn’t mean I’m going along with any of this or that I don’t want to get you just as bad as ever. I just like acrobats, that’s all, and never miss a chance to see them. Then I’m going to watch your damned news and I’m going to bed.” Mr. Ordz settled back to watch the acrobats who did several encores.

  The m.c. came on again. He had changed his Halloween costume to a dinner jacket and he was puffing away at a cigarette. “All right, I’m going to go right into the news tonight. I am a little rattled and there’s no point denying it. Do you think that this is what I wanted to be doing this week? I just want to get my damned sponsor and get out of here. That’s all for tonight and here is your disaster coverage. I like you more than I thought I would and I got them to allow some sports. It’s about a carload of pro football players that overturned in New Mexico, but it’s sports in a way.”

  The following day Mr. Ordz went to see his doctor about a pain in his belly. “It’s either real or imagined,” he said to the doctor.

  “Can you describe it?” asked the doctor.

  “It’s sort of red with gray edges and is constant.”

  “It’ll probably go away,” said the doctor. “If it turns blue let me know and we’ll take it from there.”

  “Are you kidding me?” asked Mr. Ordz.

  “I’m a doctor,” said the doctor.

  Mr. Ordz stayed in town that night to see a foreign film about a tempestuous goat farm. When it was over he went down into the lounge. He was all alone and the TV set was on. His m.c. was dressed like the La Strada carnival man.

  “I expected this,” said the m.c. “The research showed you have to peek under bandages. If a doctor said, ‘Your life depends on it,’ you’d have to sneak a peek anyway. So I knew you’d stay away from your set tonight, but I also knew you’d have to peek at some set. Whoever knocked research is crazy. Now look, forget last night when I said I was rattled. I know one thing. I’ve got to have a sponsor or I go nowhere. If I could reach out there and personally slit your gizzard I’d do it without batting an eyelash. As it is, I’ll just have to torment your tail until you go by yourself. Incidentally, I can tell you the details. Research said you’d be here tonight, so by some finagling around I was able to get on much earlier, almost prime time. You can pick up the disaster flashes when you get home at two. Here’s your Acrobatorama and if anyone comes in while we’re on, we turn into a trusted, familiar network giveaway show.”

  When Alonzo’s men had taken their third encore, Mr. Ordz took the train home and rode between the cars. At one point, he dipped his foot way down outside the car giddily, but then retrieved it and rode home for the two o’clock disasters.

  The following night, Friday, Mrs. Ordz joined Mr. Ordz on the television chaise and showered him with love bites on the nose. “I’ll erupt,” she said, her matronly bosom heaving with tension. “I warn you I’ll erupt right down here and we don’t have a door shutter.”

  “Hold off,” said Mr. Ordz. “I don’t tell you things, but I’ve got to tell you this thing.” He told her the story of the secret channel and the m.c.’s threats, but her lids were closed and she whispered, “You’re speaking words, but I hear only hoarse animal sounds. Tame me boobsie, tame me, or I’ll erupt before the world.”

  “I can’t get through to anyone because I’m too nervous to say what I mean,” said Mr. Ordz. “If I get angry enough, if only I can get angry enough, everyone will hear me loud and clear.”

  “Wild,” sh
e said through clenched teeth. “You’re wild as the wind.”

  “I wish you would hold off,” said Mr. Ordz, but his wife would not be shunted aside and he finally carried her stocky body upstairs, getting back downstairs at two-thirty a.m. The hard-faced female singer said, “He told me to tell you that he had a cold but that he’d be back tomorrow night if it killed him. I don’t know his name either. He said he didn’t have time to line up a replacement and that you should just go to bed, unless you want to hear me sing.”

  “No,” said Mr. Ordz. “I don’t care what you do. I’m not going along with this. I just want to see how far the whole thing carries.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you’re the one who wanted acrobats. Do you think I’d do this crummy show if I had something else? But I figure one exposure is better than none and you might have some connections. I also do figure modeling. We’re skipping the news tonight. Since you don’t want me to warble a few, I have a modeling date tonight. I only do work for legit photogs.”