“Wait a minute, wait. You got on your topcoat still. I got to talk to you.”
“Oh, there’s no need for talk,” Grant said, kissing her neck and shoulders, and feeling for a zipper.
“Cut that out, you’re driving me crazy,” she said. “Listen, I got to talk, this is very serious what we’re involved in, you and I. I had two girlfriends involved in this very same thing and it ruined their lives. Ida-”
“Oh, don’t worry, darling,” Grant said, struggling to get a firm grasp on her wrists. “There’s nothing to--”
“But let me tell you about Ida Glass! She could never make up her mind, if it was right or not. She never did and she had a breakdown, a complete breakdown!”
“You see?” Grant said, searching for the zipper again. “That’s what frustration can do to you.”
“But what about Bernice?” she cried. “Bernice did. She went wild for this guy. She ran off with this guy, left her kids, everything. Then the guy left her. Poor Bernice. She’s on her sixth marriage.”
Grant forgot that such a thing as a zipper had ever been invented. “Who’s talking about anything like that?” he said. “Who’s said anything like that?”
“Me, me. It’s what I’m talking about,” she said distractedly. “I mean, look, I never thought I was sexy. I never did. But last night you made me feel so sexy, just looking at you. I got a passion for you, a real passion. Oh, I want to absorb you or something. But that’s all. I mean, why can’t I have it without interfering with my life? Why can’t I? So I have to know, what do you expect? I mean, for instance, you got a happy home life, or what?”
“Oh, it’s delightful,” Grant said, and he wrapped his arms around her and they fell together upon the sofa. “This is all I expect. This.”
“Oh, I like it,” she said in his ear. “I like it.”
~ * ~
At four o’clock the city sky outside the windows was darkening. Grant thought she was asleep and he started to get up. She put out her hand and opened her eyes.
“Hey, you leaving me? Where you going?”
“Make a drink. Want one?”
“Uh-uh. Listen, I’m hungry. Make me a sandwich. There’s turkey in the fridge. With lots of Russian.”
The apartment felt cool to Grant and as he walked into the living room he turned up the heat. He stood staring out the window, standing so that anyone looking in would not see him.
It had been the strangest day he had ever spent. That terrible hangover, the feeling he had lost everything. Then he had talked with that charming girl. He smiled. A real little angel.
He realized what his choice of words had been, and he frowned. He had never used that phrase before except to describe a young girl child, and the girl in the bar had not been that young. After all, she’d been drunk in Chicago, she’d spent . . . “And spent all the gold they’d given me,” she had said. She had said it; she had said gold!
“But you can’t spend gold in Chicago!” Grant cried.
“Yeah?” a voice in the bedroom said. “Honey, you take me to Chicago and I’ll show you. In the meantime, how about my sandwich? With plenty of Russian.”
Grant said, “You want a pickle?”
“No, honey. No pickle.”
Of course, Grant thought, as he opened the refrigerator, gold is slang for money, like bread. That must be it. But she was certainly a little angel.
His mind stumbled again over that word. Oh, cut it out, he told himself, or you’ll start having auditory hallucinations again . . . But perhaps he hadn’t; perhaps she had blessed him.
Grant sat on the kitchen stool and stared at the Russian dressing.
She had suddenly appeared in the bar. Her hair had glowed, actually glowed. “Well, no. It has the time where I came from.” Where had that been? “No. I simply meant I fly alone, by myself.” Without a planet “I have to prove I’m worthy,” she had said, too. So when she came to New York she found someone down and out, and bought him a drink. And I was certainly down and out, emotionally, Grant thought, and she did buy me a drink. Then disappeared. Vanished. And he had walked uptown, gone to the river. What had she said about meditating? Sacred places were found close to nature, or something. That spot by the East River had been a sacred place of his youth. What had she said? “It’s an experience that will be beneficial and rewarding for you.”
But why me? Grant thought. I am no more worthy than anyone else, no more deserving, and certainly no better.
He took the sandwich into the bedroom and Jackie sat up, sitting cross-legged on the bed, to eat it. She stared at him. “You got the funniest look on your face,” she said, chewing. “What happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” John Grant said.
In the days that followed, he decided he had, accidentally or by some plan, seen and talked to an angel. He knew he could not prove it, he could not prove angels existed. But logically he could not prove they did not exist. So he chose to believe he had talked with a little angel. The fact that he had seen her in a bar was explained by her being a fallen angel, but one who had not fallen too far. She had to go into bars, of course, to prove that she was worthy, that she could resist temptation. And she had conducted herself like a perfect lady: two drinks and no more. The hardest question Grant had to answer was the one concerning his own worth: Why had she visited him? The answer, when he thought of it, was quite simple. There are angels going about every day, looking much like people. We see them when we are ready to, or perhaps when we need to—but they are always among us.
In the days that followed, Grant watched for her. He went to that same bar, but she never came in. Once he followed a blonde three blocks up Madison before she paused to glance in Abercrombie’s windows, and he saw she was no angel. And more than once he went down to the Bowery.
“Friend of mine comes down here,” he would say. “Small girl. Blonde. Wears a black coat. Ever see her?”
The bums were kind to him, because he was obviously squirrelly; they accepted his dollars, said they would sure watch for her, they would sure let him know.
In the days that followed, Grant found a sacred spot in the wood lot behind his Fairfield County home. A large stone on which he sat. His meditations, he knew, might be called reflections by others. No great truths were ever revealed to him. He thought of the past, what had happened, and then he thought of the future, what he could do. Then he would rise, with a quiet feeling, and rejoin his family.
And, in the days that passed, John Grant prospered, and so Fred prospered, too. Grant became known, locally around Stamford, for his kindness to children, to small birds and to the elderly. He became a more gentle lover—oh, Jackie Regal could have written books about it; and, when he did have hangovers, which was seldom, they were always mild, and finished and done with by nine o’clock of a morning.
<
~ * ~
THE FIEND
BY FREDERIK POHL
Frederik Pohl, literary agent emeritus, current editor of Galaxy magazine, author of superior science fiction, gentleman of erudition and charm, “is not afraid of emotion, so that his stories have a drive and power enviable in any writer, especially in one whose main outlet is science fiction.” So says The New York Times. His books include the stimulating collections “Tomorrow Times Seven” and “The Case Against Tomorrow,” the novel “Slave Ship” and, with the late C. M. Kornbluth, such novels as “Gladiator-at-Law,” “Search the Sky” and “The Space Merchants” an admonitory satire on future ad-men, which Anthony Boucher calls “a book so rewarding that it should henceforth show up on all lists of science-fiction ‘classics” which Kingsley Amis says “has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far” and which, as this anthology goes to press, has been purchased by the movie moguls for a whopping five-figure sum. In his playboy story, “The Fiend,” Pohl takes a standard sci-fi staple—suspended animation of space passengers during long interstellar voyages—and brings to it a fresh idea and a surprising twist.
HOW BEAUTIFUL she was, Dandish thought, and how helpless. The plastic identification ribbon around her neck stood out straight, and as she was just out of the transport capsule, she wore nothing else. “Are you awake?” he asked, but she did not stir.
Dandish felt excitement building up inside him, she was so passive and without defense. A man could come to her now and do anything at all to her, and she would not resist. Or, of course, respond. Without touching her he knew that her body would be warm and dry. It was fully alive, and in a few minutes she would be conscious.
Dandish—who was the captain and sole crew member of the interstellar ship without a name carrying congealed colonists across the long, slow, empty space from the Earth to a planet that circled a star that had never had a name in astronomical charts, only a number, and was now called Eleanor—passed those minutes without looking again at the girl, whose name he knew to be Silvie but whom he had never met. When he looked again she was awake, jackknifed against the safety straps of the crib, her hair standing out around her head and her face wearing an expression of anger. “All right. Where are you? I know what the score is,” she said. “Do you know what they can do to you for this?”
Dandish was startled. He did not like being startled, for it frightened him. For nine years the ship had been whispering across space; he had had enough loneliness to satisfy him and he had been frightened. There were 700 cans of colonists on the ship, but they lay brittle and changeless in their bath of liquid helium and were not very good company. Outside the ship the nearest human being was perhaps two light-years away, barring some chance-met ship heading in the other direction that was actually far more remote than either star, since the forces involved in stopping and matching course with a vessel bound home were twice as great as, and would take twice as much time as, those involved in the voyage itself.
Everything about the trip was frightening. The loneliness was a terror. To stare down through an inch of crystal and see nothing but far stars led to panic. Dandish had decided to stop looking out five years before, but had not been able to keep to his decision, and so now and again peeped through the crystal and contemplated his horrifying visions of the seal breaking, the crystal popping out on a breath of air, himself in his metal prison tumbling, tumbling forever down to the heart of one of the 10,000,000 stars that lay below. In this ship a noise was an alarm. Since no one but himself was awake, to hear a scratch of metal or a thud of a moving object striking something else, however tiny, however remote, was a threat, and more than once Dandish had suffered through an itch of fear for hours or days until he tracked down the exploded light tube or unsecured door that had startled him. He dreamed uneasily of fire. This was preposterously unlikely, in the steel and crystal ship, but what he was dreaming of was not the fire of a house but the monstrous fires in the stars beneath.
“Come out where I can see you,” commanded the girl.
Dandish noted that she had not troubled to try to cover her nakedness. Bare she woke and bare she stayed. She had unhitched the restraining webbing and left the crib, and now she was prowling the room in which she had awakened, looking for him. “They warned us,” she called. “ ‘Watch the hook!’ ‘Look out for the space nuts!’ ‘You’ll be sorry!’ That’s all we heard at the Reception Center, and now here you are, all right. Wherever you are. Where are you? For God’s sake, come out so I can see you.” She half stood and half floated at an angle to the floor, nibbling at imperceptible bits of dead skin on her lips and staring warily from side to side. She said, “What was the story you were going to tell me? A subspace meteorite destroyed the ship, all but you and me, and we were doomed to fly endlessly toward nowhere, so there was nothing for us to do but try to make a life for ourselves?”
Dandish watched her through the view eyes in the reviving room, but did not answer. He was a connoisseur of victims, Dandish was. He had spent a great deal of time planning this. Physically she was perfect, very young, slim, slight. He had picked her out on that basis from among the 352 female canned colonists, leafing through the microfile photographs that accompanied each colonist’s dossier like a hi-fi hobbyist shopping through a catalog. She had been the best of the lot. Dandish was not skilled enough to be able to read a personality profile, and in any event considered psychologists to be phonies and their profiles trash, so he had had to go by the indices he knew. He had wanted his victim to be innocent and trusting. Silvie, 16 years old and a little below average in intelligence, had seemed very promising. It was disappointing that she did not react with more fear. “They’ll give you fifty years for this!” she shouted, looking around to see where he could be hiding. “You know that, don’t you?”
The revival crib, sensing that she was out of it, was quietly stowing and rearming itself, ready to be taken out and used again. Its plastic sheets slipped free of the corners, rolled up in a tight spiral and slid into a disposal chute, revealing aseptic new sheets below. Its radio-warming generators tested themselves with a surge of high-voltage current, found no flaws and shut themselves off. The crib sides folded down meekly. The instrument table hooded itself over. The girl paused to watch it, then shook her head and laughed. “Scared of me?” she called. “Come on, let’s get this over with! Or else,” she added, “admit you’ve made a boo-boo, get me some clothes and let’s talk this over sensibly.”
Sorrowfully Dandish turned his gaze away. A timing device reminded him that it was time to make his routine half-hour check of the ship’s systems and, as he had done more than 150,000 times already and would do 100,000 times again, he swiftly scanned the temperature readings in the can hold, metered the loss of liquid helium and balanced it against the withdrawals from the reserve, compared the ship’s course with the flight plan, measured the fuel consumption and rate of flow, found all systems functioning smoothly and returned to the girl. It had taken only a minute or so, but already she had found the comb and mirror he had put out for her and was working angrily at her hair. One fault in the techniques of freezing and revivification lay in what happened to such elaborated structures as fingernails and hair. At the temperature of liquid helium all organic matter was brittle as Prince Rupert’s drops, and although the handling techniques were planned with that fact in mind, the body wrapped gently in elastic cocooning, every care exercised to keep it from contact with anything hard or sharp, nails and hair had a way of being snapped off. The Reception Center endlessly drummed into the colonists the importance of short nails and butch haircuts, but the colonists were not always convinced. Silvie now looked like a dummy on which a student wigmaker had failed a test. She solved her problem at last by winding what remained of her hair in a tiny bun and put down the comb, snapped-off strands of hair floating in the air all about her like a stretched-out sandstorm.
She patted the bun mournfully and said, “I guess you think this is pretty funny.”
Dandish considered the question. He was not impelled to laugh. Twenty years before, when Dandish was a teenager with the long permanented hair and the lacquered fingernails that were the fashion for kids that year, he had dreamed almost every night of just such a situation as this. To own a girl of his own—not to love her or to rape her or to marry her, but to possess her as a slave, with no one anywhere to stop him from whatever he chose to impose on her—had elaborated itself in a hundred variations nightly. He didn’t tell anyone about his dream, not directly, but in the school period devoted to practical psychology he had mentioned it as something he had read in a book and the instructor, staring right through him into his dreams, told him it was a repressed wish to play with dolls. “This fellow is role playing,” he said, “acting out a wish to be a woman. These clear-cut cases of repressed homosexuality can take many forms…and on and on, and although the dreams were as physically satisfying as ever, the young Dandish awoke from them both reproved and resentful.
But Silvie was neither a dream nor a doll. “I’m not a doll!” said Silvie, so sharply and partly that it was a shock. “C
ome on out and get it over with!”
She straightened up, holding to a free-fall grip, and although she looked angry and annoyed she still did not seem afraid. “Unless you are really crazy,” she said clearly, “which I doubt, although I have to admit it’s a possibility, you aren’t going to do anything I don’t want you to do, you know. Because you can’t get away with it, right? You can’t kill me, you could never explain it, and besides they don’t let murderers run ships in the first place, and so when we land all I have to do is yell cop and you’re running a subway shuttle for the next ninety years.” She giggled. “I know about that. My uncle got busted on income-tax evasion and now he’s a self-propelled dredge in the Amazon delta, and you should see the letters he writes. So come on out and let’s see what I’m willing to let you get away with.”
She grew impatient. “Kee-rist,” she said, shaking her head. “I sure get the great ones. And, oh, by the way, as long as I’m up, I have to go to the little girls’ room, and then I want breakfast.”
Dandish took some small satisfaction in that these requirements, at least, he had foreseen. He opened the door to the washroom and turned on the warmer oven where emergency rations were waiting. By the time Silvie came back biscuits, bacon and hot coffee were set out for her.
The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 22