Can & Can'tankerous

by Harlan Ellison

  Then again, querulously, “Tuesday?”

  That was all. Nothing more; no aphorism about meeting one’s true love on Tuesday; no saccharine cliché denoting Tuesday as the advent of good fortune; no Tuesday-themed accompanying notation warning of investing in hi-tech stocks on Tuesday. Nothing. Just the narrow, slightly-gray slip of rectangular paper with the printed word Tuesday and a period immediately after it.

  Henry muttered to himself. “Why Tuesday? What Tuesday?” He absently let the fortune cookie slip from his fingers.

  “Damn!” he murmured, watching the cookie sink quickly to the bottom of his water glass.

  He returned his attention to the fortune. Tuesday. That was today. Biting his lower lip, Henry reached for the second of the three cookies. He pulled at the edge of the fortune paper protruding from the convoluted pastry. Placing the cookie back on its plate carefully, he turned the slip over and read it:

  You’re the one.

  Henry Leclair had been a premature baby. His mother, Martha Annette Leclair, had not carried him full term. Eight months, two days. Boom. Enter baby Henry. There was no explanation save the vagaries of female physiology. However, there was another explanation: Henry—even prenatal—had been curious. Pathologically, even pre-natally, curious. He had wanted free from the womb, had wanted to discover what was out there.

  When he was two years old, Henry had been discovered, in trapdoor-bottom pajamas, in mid-winter, crouching in the snow outside his home, waiting to see whether the white stuff fell from above or came up through the ground.

  At the age of seven they had to cut Henry down. He had been swinging from a clothesline strung in the basement, drying the family wash. Henry had been curious: what does it feel like to strangle?

  By the time he was thirteen, Henry had read every volume of the ENCYLOPAEDIA BRITTANICA, copious texts on every phase of the sciences, all matter disseminated by the government for the past twenty-eight years, and biographies by the score. Also, somewhere between seven thousand, eight hundred, and seven thousand, nine hundred books on history, religion, and sociology. He avoided books of cartoons—and novels.

  By the time he was twenty, Henry wore noticeably thick-lensed glasses; and he had migraine headaches. But his all-consuming curiosity had not been satiated.

  On his thirty-first birthday, Henry was unmarried and digging for bits of a stone tablet in the remains of a lost city somewhere near the Dead Sea. Curiosity.

  Henry Leclair was curious about almost everything. He wondered why a woman wore egret feathers in her hat, rather than those of the peacock. He wondered why lobsters turned red when they were cooked. He wondered why office buildings did not have thirteenth floors. He wondered why men left home. He wondered what the soot-accumulation rate in his city was. He wondered why he had a strawberry mark on his right knee. He wondered all sorts of things.

  Curiosity. He was helpless, driven, doomed in its itching, overwhelming, adhesive grip.

  You're the one.

  “I’m the one?” Henry blurted incredulously. “Me?” I’m the what? What am I? What the blazes are you talking about?” He spoke to the insensate, unresponsive fortune paper.

  This was, suddenly, overpoweringly, a conundrum for Henry. He knew, deep in his soul-matter, that curiosity demanded he must solve this intrusive enigma. Two such fortunes—two such incomprehensible mind-troublers—were more than mere coyness on someone’s part. There was something not quite right here. Something, as Henry put it to himself, with stunning originality, more than meets the eye!

  Henry called for the waiter. The short, almost bald, and overly-contemptuous Oriental passed twice more—once in either direction—finally coming to a halt beside Henry’s booth. Henry extended the two fortunes and said, “Who writes these?”

  ",” answered the waiter, with a touch of insouciant, yet distingué, impudence.

  “I beg your pardon,” Henry said, removing his noticeably thick-lensed glasses, dangling them in his other hand, “but would you mind speaking English?”

  The waiter wrinkled his nose in distaste, stroked the cloth napkin draped over his forearm, and pointed to the manager, lounging half-asleep behind the cash register.

  “Thanks,” said Henry absently, his attention to the chase now directed elsewhere. He started to rise as the waiter turned. “Oh—check, please.” The waiter stopped dead in his tracks, drew his shoulders up as though he had been struck an especially foul blow, and returned to the table. He hurriedly scribbled the check, all in Chinese glyphs except the total, and plunked it on the table. Muttering Eastern epithets, he stalked away.

  Henry absently dropped the remaining fortune cookie in his jacket pocket as he picked up the check—so anxious was he now to speak to the manager. Quickly slapping his hat on his head, he gathered his topcoat off the chair, dropped a dollar and some change, and headed for the manager. The old man was slumped across the glass case, one arm securely pressed against the cash register’s drawer. He awakened at almost the instant Henry stopped in front of him. His hand extended automatically for check and cash.

  While the fellow was placing his check on a spindle, Henry leaned across and asked, quietly, “Can you tell me where you get these little fortunes?” He showed one. Henry expected more misdirection and confusion, as he had experienced with the waiter, but the Chinese manager did not take his eyes off the change he was delivering as he said, “We buy in lots. From trading company that sell us cookies. You want buy dozen, take home with you?”

  Henry fended him off, and asked the name and address of the company. After a few seconds of deliberation, the manager reached out of sight under the counter, dragged forth a large notebook. He opened it, ran a finger down a column of addresses, said, “Saigon-San Francisco Trading Company, 431 Bessemer Street.”

  Henry thanked him and strode out onto the sidewalk. “Taxi!” he called into the river of passing cars, and a few minutes later was riding toward 431 Bessemer Street. The crimson clutching claw of cold curiosity. Oh, my.

  The Saigon-San Francisco Trading Company was located in a condemned warehouse on the desolate lower end of Bessemer Street. In the manufacturing and warehouse section of the city, Bessemer Street was regarded as the dropoff dead end of the known universe. On Bessemer Street, the lower end was regarded much the same. Henry had an idea this building was the last rung on the ladder of aversion. Beyond lay the dark, restless river.

  The windows of the pathetic warehouse were, for the most part, broken and sightless; many were boarded up. The building itself leaned far out of plumb, dolorous, as though seeking impecunious support from some destitute relative on its west side. Its west side faced an empty, rat-infested lot.

  So, for that matter, did the east, north, and south sides. Dolorous, pathetic, rat-infested.

  “A pretty sorry place for an active trading company,” murmured Henry, pulling his coat collar up about his ears. The wind ricocheting through the darkened warehouse canyons was rock-chilling, this late at night. Henry glanced at his wristwatch. Nearly eleven o’clock. It was the hour when the terminally curious talked to themselves:

  “Um. Probably no one working at this time, no late shift, but at least I can get an idea of what the place is like, as long as I’m here.” He mentally kicked himself for taking off in such a flurry of desire to solve the riddle of the fortune papers. “I should have waited till reasonable working hours, tomorrow morning. Ah, well…”

  He walked across the street, stepping quickly in and out of the smudge of light thrown by a lone, remarkably, unshattered street lamp. Henry glanced nervously behind him.

  Far off, back the way they had come, he could see the rapidly disappearing taillights of the taxi.

  “Why the devil didn’t I ask him to wait?” Henry had no answer for himself, though one did, in fact, exist: the mind-clouding power of curiosity. Now he would have to walk far in the wind, the cold, the dark, to the nearest hack stand or at least an inhabited thoroughfare.

  The building loomed
over him. He went up to the front door. Locked solid; steel bolts welded to the frame.

  “Hmm. Locked up for good.” He glanced at the dirty CONDEMNED sign beside the door. Then he muttered, “Odd,” with uncertainty, because there were fresh truck tire treadmarks in the mud of the street. The tracks led around to the rear of the warehouse. Henry found his interest in this problem mounting. Piqued, piqued, piqued. Deserted, condemned: but still getting deliveries, or pickups? Curiouser and curiouser.

  He walked around to the rear of the warehouse, following the truck tracks. They stopped beside a number of square indentations in the mud. “Somebody left a bunch of crates here.”

  He looked around. The rear of the building bulked uglier than the front—if that was possible. All but one of the windows was boarded, and that one…

  Henry realized he was looking at light streaming through the window, there on the top floor. It was blanked out for a moment, then came back. As though someone had walked in front of it. But that light’s in the ceiling, Henry thought wildly. I can see the edge of the fixture from here. How can anyone walk in front of it?

  His wonderment was cut short by still further signs of activity in the building. A circular opening in the wall next to the window—quite dark and obviously a pipe-shaft of some sort—was emitting large puffs of faintly phosphorescent green fog.

  There’s someone up there,” Henry concluded, ever the rocket scientist.

  The Urge rose in Henry Leclair once more. The problem thumped and bobbed in his mind. Curiosity, now a tsunami, had utterly overwhelmed even the tiniest atoll of caution and self-preservation. You’re the one, you say? You’d better believe it because here I come!

  He carefully examined the rear of the building. No doors. But a first floor window was broken, and the boards were loose. As quietly as possible, he disengaged the nails’ grip on the sill, and prised the boards off. Dragging two old crates from the dumpster across the alley, Henry stacked them, and climbed into the building. Curious is, as curious does. (Did anyone hear a cat being killed?)

  It was pitch, night, ebony, lusterless, without qualification dark inside. Henry held his pipe lighter aloft and rasped it, letting the flame illuminate the place for a few seconds.

  Broken crates, old newspapers, cobwebs, dust. The place looked deserted. But there had been the light from above.

  He sought out the elevator. Useless. He sought out the stairs. Bricked off. He sat down on a packing crate. Annoyed.

  Then the sound of glugging came to him.

  Glug. Glug. And again, glug. Then a sort of washed-out, whimpery glug that even Henry could tell was a defective: Gluuuuuug!

  “Plummis!” swore a voice in shivering falsetto.

  Henry listened for a minute more, but no other sound came to him. “Oh, that was cursing, all right,” murmured Henry to himself. “I don’t know who’s doing it, or where it’s coming from, but that’s unquestionably someone’s equivalent of a damn or hell!” He began searching for the source of the voice.

  As he neared one wall, the voice came again. “Plummis, valts er webbel er webbel er webbel…” the voice trailed off into muttered webbels.

  Henry looked up. There was light shining through a ragged hole in the ceiling, very faintly shining. He stepped directly under it to assay a clearer view…

  …and was yanked bodily and immediately up through many such holes in many such ceilings, till his head came into violent contact with a burnished metal plate in the ceiling of the top floor.

  “Aaargh!” moaned Henry, crashing to the floor, clutching his banged head, clutching his crushed hat.

  “Serves you qquasper!” the shivering falsetto voice remonstrated. Henry looked around. The room was filled with strangely-shaped machines resting on metal workbenches. They were all humming, clicking, gasping, winking, and glugging efficiently. All, that is, but one, that emitted a normal glug then collapsed into a fit of prolonged gluuuuuuging.

  “Plummis!” Falsetto cursing: vehemently.

  Henry looked around once more. The room was empty. He glanced toward the ceiling. The unie was sitting cross-legged in the air, about six inches below the ceiling.

  “You’re…” The rest of it got caught somewhere in Henry’s throat.

  “I’m Eggzaborg. You’d call me a unie, if you had the intelligence to call me.”

  “You’re…” Henry tried again.

  “I’m invading the Earth,” he said snappishly. The unie completed the thought for Henry, even though that was not even remotely what Henry had been thinking.

  Henry took a closer look at the unie.

  He was a little thing, no more than two feet tall, almost a gnome, with long, knobbly arms and legs, a pointed head and huge, blue, owl-like eyes with nictitating eyelids. He had a fragile antenna swaying gently from the center of his forehead. It ended in a feather. A light-blue feather. Almost robin’s egg blue, Henry thought inanely.

  The unie’s nose was thin and straight, with tripartite nostrils, overhanging a tight line of mouth, and bracketed by cherubic, puffy cheeks. He had no eyebrows. His ears were pointed and set very high on his skull. He was hairless.

  The unie wore a form-fitting suit of bright yellow, and pinned to the breast was a monstrous button, half the size of his chest, which quite plainly read:

  CONQUEROR.

  The unie caught Henry’s gaze. “The button. Souvenir. Made it up for myself. Can’t help being pompous, giving in to hubris once in a while.” He said it somewhat sheepishly. “Attractive, though, don’t you think?”

  Henry closed his eyes very tightly, pressing with the heels of both hands. He wrinkled his forehead, letting his noticeably thick-lensed glasses slide down his nose just a bit, to unfocus the unie. “I am not well,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Not well at all.”

  The shivering falsetto broke into chirping laughter.

  “Well enough now!” Eggzaborg chortled. “But just wait three thousand years—just wait!” Henry opened his left eye a slit. Eggzaborg was rolling helplessly around in the air, clutching a place on his body roughly where his abdomen should have been. The unie bumped lightly against the ceiling, besotted with his revelry.

  A thin shower of plaster fell across Henry’s face. He felt the cool tickle of it on his eyelids and nose. That plaster, thought Henry, was real. Ergo, this unie must be real.

  This is a lot like being in trouble.

  “You wrote those fortunes?” Henry inquired, holding them up for the unie to see.

  “Fortunes?” The unie spoke to himself. “For...ohhh! You must mean the mentality-crushers I’ve been putting in the cookies!” He rubbed long, thin fingers together. “I knew, I say, I just knew they would produce results!” He looked pensive for a moment, then sighed. “Things have been so slow. I’ve actually wondered once or twice if I’m really succeeding. Well, more than once or twice, actually. Actually, about ten or twenty million times! Plummis!”

  He let his shoulders slump, and folded his knobbly hands in his knobbly lap, looking wistfully at Henry Leclair. “Poor thing,” he said. (Henry wasn’t sure if the unie meant his visitor…or himself.)

  Henry ignored him for a moment, deciding to unravel this as he had always unraveled every conundrum in his search for information: calmly, sequentially, first things first. Since the unie’s comments were baffling in the light of any historical conquests Henry had ever read about, he decided to turn his immediate attention elsewhere before trying to make sense of the nonsensical. First things first.

  He crawled to his feet and unsteadily walked over to the machines. All the while glancing up to keep an eye on Eggzaborg. The machines hurt his eyes.

  A tube-like apparatus mounted on an octagonal casing was spitting—through an orifice—buttons. The shape of the machine hurt his eyes. The buttons were of varying sizes, colors, shapes. Shirt buttons, coat buttons, industrial sealing buttons, watch-cap buttons, canvas tent buttons, exotic-purpose buttons. Many buttons, all kinds of buttons. Many of them were cracked
, or the sides of the thread holes were sharpened enough to split the thread. They all fell into a trough with holes, graded themselves, and plunged through attached tubes into cartons on the floor. Henry blinked once.

  The shape of the second machine hurt Henry’s eyes; the device seemed to be grinding a thin line between the head and shank of twopenny nails. The small buzz-wheel ground away while the nail spun, held between pincers. As soon as an almost invisible line had been worn on the metal, the nail dropped into a bucket. Henry blinked twice.

  The other machines, whose shapes really hurt Henry’s eyes, were performing equally petty, yet subversive, procedures. One was all angles and glass sheets, leading to the hole in the wall Henry had seen from below. It was glugging frantically. The puffs of glowing green fog were still erupting sporadically.

  “That one wilts lettuce,” Eggzaborg said, with pride.

  “It what?”

  The unie looked shocked. “You don’t think lettuce wilts of its own accord, do you?”

  “Well, I never thought about it—that is—food rots, it goes bad of its own…uh, nature…entropy…doesn’t it? It doesn’t? Sure it does, yeah?”

  “Poor thing,” the unie repeated, looking even more wistful than before. Pity shone in his eyes. “It’s almost like taking advantage of a very slow pony.”

  Henry felt this was the moment; but since the unie was obviously not human, he would have to handle things carefully. He was dealing with an alien intellect. Oh, yes, that was the long and short of it. An alien from another place in the universe. An e.t. sort of creature. Yes, indeed. He must never forget that. Probably a highly dangerous alien intellect. He didn’t look very dangerous. But then, one couldn’t tell with these alien intellects. One always has to be on one’s toes with these devious, cunning alien intellects; Orson Welles knew that.

  “All right, then,” said Henry, nay, challenged Henry, “so you wilt lettuce. So what? How does that aid you in conquering the Earth?”