Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  He fell asleep quickly, lying there in his clothes.

  But he didn't sleep long. Edith shook him and he opened his eyes to a lighted room. "Phil and Rhona are here." He blinked at her. She smiled, and it seemed her old smile. "They're so anxious to see you, Hank. I could barely keep Phil from coming up and waking you himself. They want to go out and do the town. Please, Hank, say you will."

  He sat up. "Phil," he muttered. "Phil and Rhona." They'd had wonderful times together, from grammar school on. Phil and Rhona, their oldest and closest friends. Perhaps this would begin his real homecoming.

  Do the town? They'd paint it and then tear it down!

  * * * * *

  It didn't turn out that way. He was disappointed; but then again, he'd also expected it. This entire first day at home had conditioned him to expect nothing good. They went to the bowling alleys, and Phil sounded very much the way he always had--soft spoken and full of laughter and full of jokes. He patted Edith on the head the way he always had, and clapped Hank on the shoulder (but not the way he always had--so much more gently, almost remotely), and insisted they all drink more than was good for them as he always had. And for once, Hank was ready to go along on the drinking. For once, he matched Phil shot for shot, beer for beer.

  They didn't bowl very long. At ten o'clock they crossed the road to Manfred's Tavern, where Phil and the girls ordered sandwiches and coffee and Hank went right on drinking. Edith said something to him, but he merely smiled and waved his hand and gulped another ounce of nirvana.

  There was dancing to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as if he were a stranger in a city halfway around the world.

  At midnight, he was still drinking. The others wanted to leave, but he said, "I haven't danced with my girl Rhona." His tongue was thick, his mind was blurred, and yet he could read the strange expression on her face--pretty Rhona, who'd always flirted with him, who'd made a ritual of flirting with him. Pretty Rhona, who now looked as if she were going to be sick.

  "So let's rock," he said and stood up.

  They were on the dance floor. He held her close, and hummed and chatted. And through the alcoholic haze saw she was a stiff-smiled, stiff-bodied, mechanical dancing doll.

  The number finished; they walked back to the booth. Phil said, "Beddy-bye time."

  Hank said, "First one dance with my loving wife."

  He and Edith danced. He didn't hold her close as he had Rhona. He waited for her to come close on her own, and she did, and yet she didn't. Because while she put herself against him, there was something in her face--no, in her eyes; it always showed in the eyes--that made him know she was trying to be the old Edith and not succeeding. This time when the music ended, he was ready to go home.

  They rode back to town along Route Nine, he and Edith in the rear of Phil's car, Rhona driving because Phil had drunk just a little too much, Phil singing and telling an occasional bad joke, and somehow not his old self. No one was his old self. No one would ever be his old self with the First One.

  They turned left, to take the short cut along Hallowed Hill Road, and Phil finished a story about a Martian and a Hollywood sex queen and looked at his wife and then past her at the long, cast-iron fence paralleling the road. "Hey," he said, pointing, "do you know why that's the most popular place on earth?"

  Rhona glanced to the left, and so did Hank and Edith. Rhona made a little sound, and Edith seemed to stop breathing, but Phil went on a while longer, not yet aware of his supposed faux pas.

  "You know why?" he repeated, turning to the back seat, the laughter rumbling up from his chest. "You know why, folks?"

  Rhona said, "Did you notice Carl Braken and his wife at--"

  Hank said, "No, Phil, why is it the most popular place on earth?"

  Phil said, "Because people are--" And then he caught himself and waved his hand and muttered, "I forgot the punch line."

  "Because people are dying to get in," Hank said, and looked through the window, past the iron fence, into the large cemetery at the fleeting tombstones.

  The car was filled with horrified silence when there should have been nothing but laughter, or irritation at a too-old joke. "Maybe you should let me out right here," Hank said. "I'm home--or that's what everyone seems to think. Maybe I should lie down in an open grave. Maybe that would satisfy people. Maybe that's the only way to act, like Dracula or another monster from the movies."

  Edith said, "Oh, Hank, don't, don't!"

  The car raced along the road, crossed a macadam highway, went four blocks and pulled to a stop. He didn't bother saying good night. He didn't wait for Edith. He just got out and walked up the flagstone path and entered the house.

  * * * * *

  "Hank," Edith whispered from the guest room doorway, "I'm so sorry--"

  "There's nothing to be sorry about. It's just a matter of time. It'll all work out in time."

  "Yes," she said quickly, "that's it. I need a little time. We all need a little time. Because it's so strange, Hank. Because it's so frightening. I should have told you that the moment you walked in. I think I've hurt you terribly, we've all hurt you terribly, by trying to hide that we're frightened."

  "I'm going to stay in the guest room," he said, "for as long as necessary. For good if need be."

  "How could it be for good? How, Hank?"

  That question was perhaps the first firm basis for hope he'd had since returning. And there was something else; what Carlisle had told him, even as Carlisle himself had reacted as all men did.

  "There are others coming, Edith. Eight that I know of in the tanks right now. My superior, Captain Davidson, who died at the same moment I did--seven months ago next Wednesday--he's going to be next. He was smashed up worse than I was, so it took a little longer, but he's almost ready. And there'll be many more, Edith. The government is going to save all they possibly can from now on. Every time a young and healthy man loses his life by accident, by violence, and his body can be recovered, he'll go into the tanks and they'll start the regenerative brain and organ process--the process that made it all possible. So people have to get used to us. And the old stories, the old terrors, the ugly old superstitions have to die, because in time each place will have some of us; because in time it'll be an ordinary thing."

  Edith said, "Yes, and I'm so grateful that you're here, Hank. Please believe that. Please be patient with me and Ralphie and--" She paused. "There's one question."

  He knew what the question was. It had been the first asked him by everyone from the president of the United States on down.

  "I saw nothing," he said. "It was as if I slept those six and a half months--slept without dreaming."

  She came to him and touched his face with her lips, and he was satisfied.

  Later, half asleep, he heard a dog howling, and remembered stories of how they announced death and the presence of monsters. He shivered and pulled the covers closer to him and luxuriated in being safe in his own home.

  * * *

  Contents

  IN THE DARK

  By Ronal Kayser

  Is was a tale of sheer horror that old Asa Gregg poured into the dictaphone

  The watchman's flashlight printed a white circle on the frosted-glass, black-lettered door:

  GREGG CHEMICAL CO., MFRS.

  ASA GREGG, PRES.

  PRIVATE

  The watchman's hand closed on the knob, rattled the door in its frame. Queer, but tonight the sound had seemed to come from in there.... But that couldn't be. He knew that Mr. Gregg and Miss Carruthers carried the only keys to the office, so any intruder would have been forced to smash the lock.

  Maybe the sound came from the storage room. The watchman clumped along the rubber-matted corridor, flung his weight against that door. It opened hard, being of ponderous metal fitted into a cork casing. The room was an air-tight, fire-proof vault, really. His shoes gritted
on the concrete floor as he prowled among the big porcelain vats. The flashlight bored through bluish haze to the concrete walls. Acid fumes escaping under the vat lids made the haze and seared the man's throat.

  He hurried out, coughing and wiping his eyes. It was damn funny. Every night lately he heard the same peculiar noise somewhere in this wing of the building.... like a body groaning and turning in restless sleep, it was. It scared him. He didn't mention the mystery to anyone, though. He was an old man, and he didn't want Mr. Gregg to think he was getting too old for the job.

  "Asa'd think I was crazy, if I told him about it," be mumbled.

  Inside the office, Asa Gregg heard the muttered words plainly. He sat very still in the big, leather-cushioned chair, hardly breathing until the scrape of the watchman's feet had thinned away down the hall. There was no light in the room to betray him; only the cherry-colored tip of his cigar, which couldn't be visible through the frosted glass door. Anyway, it'd be an hour before the watchman's round brought him past the office again. Asa Gregg had that hour, if he could screw up his nerve to use it....

  He took the frayed end of the cigar from his mouth. His hand, which had wasted to mere skin and bone these past few months, groped through the darkness, slid over the polished coolness of the dictaphone hood, and snapped the switch. Machinery faintly whirred. His fingers found the tube, lifted it.

  "Miss Carruthers!" he snapped. Then he hesitated. Surely, he could trust Mary Carruthers! He'd never wondered about her before. She'd been his secretary for a dozen years—lately, since he couldn't look after affairs himself as he used to, she had practically run the business. She was forty, sensible, unbeautiful, and tight-lipped. Hell, he had to trust her!

  His voice plunged into the darkness.

  "What I have to say now is intended for Mrs. Gregg's ears only. She will take the first boat home, of course. Meet that boat and bring her to the office. Since my wife knows nothing about a dictaphone, it will be necessary for you to set this record running. As soon as you have done so, leave her alone in the room. Make sure she's not interrupted for a half-hour. That's all."

  He waited a decent interval. The invisible needle peeled its thread into the revolving wax cylinder.

  "Jeannette," muttered Asa Gregg, and hesitated again. This wasn't going to be easy to say. He decided to begin matter-of-factly. "As you probably know, my will and the insurance policies are in the vault at the First National. I believe you will find all of my papers in excellent order. If any questions arise, consult Miss Carruthers. What I have to say to you now is purely personal—I feel, my dear, that I owe you an explanation—that is——"

  God, it came harder than he had expected.

  "Jeannette," he started in afresh, "you remember three years ago when I was in the hospital. You were in Palm Beach at the time, and 1 wired that there'd been an accident here at the plant. That wasn't strictly so. The fact is, I'd gotten mixed up with a girl——"

  He paused, shivering. In the darkness a picture of Dot swam before him. The oval face, framed by gleaming swirls of lemon-tinted hair, had pouting scarlet lips, and eyes whose allure was intensified by violet make-up. The full-length picture of her included a streamlined, full-blossomed and yet delectably lithe Body. A costly, enticing, Broadway-chorus orchid! As a matter of fact, that was where he'd found her.

  "I won't make any excuses for myself," Asa Gregg said harshly. "I might point out that you were always in Florida or Bermuda or France, and that I was a lonely man. But it wasn't just loneliness, and I didn't seek companionship. I thought I was making a last bow to Romance. I was successful, sixty, and silly, and I did all the damn fool things—I even wrote letters to her, Popsy-wopsy letters." The dictaphone couldn't record the grimace that jerked his lips. "She saved them, of course, and by and by she put a price on them—ten thousand dollars. Dot claimed that one of those filthy tabloids had offered her that much for them—and what was a poor working-girl to do? She lied. I knew that.

  "I told her to bring the letters to the office after business hours, and I'd take care of her. I took care of her, all right. I shot her, Jeannette!"

  He mopped his face with a handkerchief that was already damp.

  "Not on account of the money, you understand. It was the things she said, after she had tucked the bills into her purse.... vile things, about the way she had earned it ten times over by enduring my beastly kisses. I'd really loved that girl, and I'd thought she'd cared for me a little. It was her hate that maddened me, and I got the gun out of my desk drawer——"

  Asa gregg reached through the darkness for the switch. He fumbled for the bottle which stood on the desk. His hand trembled, spilling some of the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle....

  This part of the story he'd skip. It was too horrible, even to think about it. He didn't want to remember how the blood pooled inside Dot's fur coat, and how he'd managed to carry the body out of the office without leaking any of her blood onto the floor. He tried to forget the musky sweetness of the perfume on the dead girl, mingled with that other evil blood-smell. Especially he didn't want to remember the frightful time he'd had stripping the gold rings from her fingers, and the one gold tooth in her head....

  The horror of it coiled in the blackness about him. His own teeth rattled against the bottle when he gulped the second drink. He snapped the switch savagely, but when he spoke his voice cringed into the tube:

  "I carried her into the storage room. I got the lid off one of die acid tanks. The vat contained an acid powerful enough to destroy anything—except gold. In fact, the vat itself had to be lined with gold-leaf. I knew that in twenty-four hours there wouldn't be a recognizable body left, and in a week there wouldn't be anything at all. No matter what the police suspected, they couldn't prove a murder charge without a corpus delicti. I had committed the perfect crime—except for one thing. I didn't realize that there'd be a splash when she went into the vat."

  Gregg laughed, not pleasantly. His wife might think it'd been a sob, when she heard this record. "Now you understand why I went to the hospital," he jerked. "Possibly you'd call that poetic justice. Oh, God!"

  His voice broke. Again he thumbed off the switch, and mopped his face with the damp linen.

  The rest—how could he explain the rest of it?

  He spent a long minute arranging his thoughts.

  "You haven't any idea," he resumed, "no one has any idea, of how I've been punished for the thing I did. I don't mean the sheer physical agony—but the fear that I'd talk coming out of the ether at the hospital. The fear that she'd been traced to my office—I'd simply hidden her rings away, expecting to drop them into the river—or that she might have confided in her lover.... yes, she had one. Or, suppose a whopping big order came through and that tank was emptied the very next day. And I couldn't ask any questions—I didn't even know what was in the papers.

  "However, that part of it gradually cleared up. I quizzed Miss Carruthers, and learned that an unidentified female body had been fished out of the East River a few days after Dot disappeared. That's how the police 'solved' the case. I got rid of her rings. I ordered that vat left alone.

  "The other thing began about six months ago."

  A spasm contorted his face. His fingers ached their grip into the dictaphone tube.

  "Jeannette, you remember when I began to object to the radio, how I'd shout at you to turn it off in the middle of a program? You thought I was ill, and worried about business.... You were wrong. The thing that got me was hearing her voice——"

  He gripped the cold cigar, chewed it. "It's very strange that you didn't notice it. No matter what station we dialed to, always that same voice came stealing into the room! But perhaps you did notice? You said, once or twice, that all those blues singers sounded alike!

  "And she was a blues singer.... It was she, all right, somewhere out in the ether, reminding me....

  "The next thing was—well, at first when I noticed it in the office I thought Miss Carruthers had suddenl
y taken up with young ideas. You see, I kept smelling perfume."

  And he smelled it now. It was like a miasma in the dark.

  "It isn't anything that Carruthers wears," he grated. "It comes from—yes, the storage room. I realized that about a month ago. Just after you sailed—one night I stayed late at the office, and I went in there.... It seemed to be strongest around the vat—her vat—and I lifted the lid.

  "The sweet, sticky musk-smell hit me like a blow in the face.

  "And that isn't all!"

  Terror stalked in this room. Asa Gregg crouched in his chair, felt the weight of Fear on him like a submarine pressure. His cigar pitched to his knees, dropped to the floor.

  "You won't believe this, Jeannette." He hammered the words like nails into the darkness in front of him. "You will say that it's impossible. I know that. It is impossible. It is a physiological absurdity—it contradicts the laws of natural science.

  "But I saw something on the bottom of that vat!"

  He groped for the bottle. His wife would hear a long gurgle, and then a coughing gasp....

  "The vat was nearly full of this transparent, oily add," he went on. "What I saw was a lot of sediment on the golden floor. And there shouldn't have been any sediment! The stuff utterly dissolves animal tissue, bone, even the common ores—keeps them in suspension.

  "It didn't look like sediment, either. I looked like a heap of mold.... gravemold!

  "I replaced the lid. I spent a week convincing myself that it was all impossible, that I couldn't have seen anything of the sort. Then I went to the vat again——"

  Silence hung in the darkness while he sucked wind into his lungs. And the words burst—separate, yammering shrieks:

  "I looked, night after night! For hours at a time I've watched the change.... Did you ever see a body decompose? Of course not! Neither have I. But you must know in a general way what the process is. Well, this has been the exact opposite!