by Various
When he tried for number four, the kid had his courage up and said, "I'll tell you when I'm ready for another, Jack." But there wasn't any trouble.
It was almost nine and the place began to fill up. The manager, a real hood type, stationed himself by the door to screen out the high-school kids and give the big hello to conventioneers. The girls came hurrying in, too, with their little makeup cases and their fancy hair piled up and their frozen faces with the perfect mouths drawn on them. One of them stopped to say something to the manager, some excuse about something, and he said: "That's aw ri'; get inna dressing room."
A three-piece band behind the drapes at the back of the stage began to make warm-up noises and there were two bartenders keeping busy. Mostly it was beer--a midweek crowd. I finished my ale and had to wait a couple of minutes before I could get another bottle. The bar filled up from the end near the stage because all the customers wanted a good, close look at the strippers for their fifty-cent bottles of beer. But I noticed that nobody sat down next to the kid, or, if anybody did, he didn't stay long--you go out for some fun and the bartender pushes you around and nobody wants to sit next to you. I picked up my bottle and glass and went down on the stool to his left.
He turned to me right away and said: "What kind of a place is this, anyway?" The broken veins were all over his face, little ones, but so many, so close, that they made his face look something like marbled rubber. The funny look in his eyes was it--the trick contact lenses. But I tried not to stare and not to look away.
"It's okay," I said. "It's a good show if you don't mind a lot of noise from--"
He stuck a cigarette into his mouth and poked the pack at me. "I'm a spacer," he said, interrupting.
I took one of his cigarettes and said: "Oh."
He snapped a lighter for the cigarettes and said: "Venus."
* * * * *
I was noticing that his pack of cigarettes on the bar had some kind of yellow sticker instead of the blue tax stamp.
"Ain't that a crock?" he asked. "You can't smoke and they give you lighters for a souvenir. But it's a good lighter. On Mars last week, they gave us all some cheap pen-and-pencil sets."
"You get something every trip, hah?" I took a good, long drink of ale and he finished his scotch and water.
"Shoot. You call a trip a 'shoot'."
One of the girls was working her way down the bar. She was going to slide onto the empty stool at his right and give him the business, but she looked at him first and decided not to. She curled around me and asked if I'd buy her a li'l ole drink. I said no and she moved on to the next. I could kind of feel the young fellow quivering. When I looked at him, he stood up. I followed him out of the dump. The manager grinned without thinking and said, "G'night, boys," to us.
The kid stopped in the street and said to me: "You don't have to follow me around, Pappy." He sounded like one wrong word and I would get socked in the teeth.
"Take it easy. I know a place where they won't spit in your eye."
He pulled himself together and made a joke of it. "This I have to see," he said. "Near here?"
"A few blocks."
We started walking. It was a nice night.
"I don't know this city at all," he said. "I'm from Covington, Kentucky. You do your drinking at home there. We don't have places like this." He meant the whole Skid Row area.
"It's not so bad," I said. "I spend a lot of time here."
"Is that a fact? I mean, down home a man your age would likely have a wife and children."
"I do. The hell with them."
He laughed like a real youngster and I figured he couldn't even be twenty-five. He didn't have any trouble with the broken curbstones in spite of his scotch and waters. I asked him about it.
"Sense of balance," he said. "You have to be tops for balance to be a spacer--you spend so much time outside in a suit. People don't know how much. Punctures. And you aren't worth a damn if you lose your point."
"What's that mean?"
"Oh. Well, it's hard to describe. When you're outside and you lose your point, it means you're all mixed up, you don't know which way the can--that's the ship--which way the can is. It's having all that room around you. But if you have a good balance, you feel a little tugging to the ship, or maybe you just know which way the ship is without feeling it. Then you have your point and you can get the work done."
"There must be a lot that's hard to describe."
He thought that might be a crack and he clammed up on me.
"You call this Gandytown," I said after a while. "It's where the stove-up old railroad men hang out. This is the place."
* * * * *
It was the second week of the month, before everybody's pension check was all gone. Oswiak's was jumping. The Grandsons of the Pioneers were on the juke singing the Man from Mars Yodel and old Paddy Shea was jigging in the middle of the floor. He had a full seidel of beer in his right hand and his empty left sleeve was flapping.
The kid balked at the screen door. "Too damn bright," he said.
I shrugged and went on in and he followed. We sat down at a table. At Oswiak's you can drink at the bar if you want to, but none of the regulars do.
Paddy jigged over and said: "Welcome home, Doc." He's a Liverpool Irishman; they talk like Scots, some say, but they sound almost like Brooklyn to me.
"Hello, Paddy. I brought somebody uglier than you. Now what do you say?"
Paddy jigged around the kid in a half-circle with his sleeve flapping and then flopped into a chair when the record stopped. He took a big drink from the seidel and said: "Can he do this?" Paddy stretched his face into an awful grin that showed his teeth. He has three of them. The kid laughed and asked me: "What the hell did you drag me into here for?"
"Paddy says he'll buy drinks for the house the day anybody uglier than he is comes in."
Oswiak's wife waddled over for the order and the kid asked us what we'd have. I figured I could start drinking, so it was three double scotches.
After the second round, Paddy started blowing about how they took his arm off without any anesthetics except a bottle of gin because the red-ball freight he was tangled up in couldn't wait.
That brought some of the other old gimps over to the table with their stories.
Blackie Bauer had been sitting in a boxcar with his legs sticking through the door when the train started with a jerk. Wham, the door closed. Everybody laughed at Blackie for being that dumb in the first place, and he got mad.
Sam Fireman has palsy. This week he was claiming he used to be a watchmaker before he began to shake. The week before, he'd said he was a brain surgeon. A woman I didn't know, a real old Boxcar Bertha, dragged herself over and began some kind of story about how her sister married a Greek, but she passed out before we found out what happened.
Somebody wanted to know what was wrong with the kid's face--Bauer, I think it was, after he came back to the table.
"Compression and decompression," the kid said. "You're all the time climbing into your suit and out of your suit. Inboard air's thin to start with. You get a few redlines--that's these ruptured blood vessels--and you say the hell with the money; all you'll make is just one more trip. But, God, it's a lot of money for anybody my age! You keep saying that until you can't be anything but a spacer. The eyes are hard-radiation scars."
"You like dot all ofer?" asked Oswiak's wife politely.
"All over, ma'am," the kid told her in a miserable voice. "But I'm going to quit before I get a Bowman Head."
"I don't care," said Maggie Rorty. "I think he's cute."
"Compared with--" Paddy began, but I kicked him under the table.
* * * * *
We sang for a while, and then we told gags and recited limericks for a while, and I noticed that the kid and Maggie had wandered into the back room--the one with the latch on the door.
Oswiak's wife asked me, very puzzled: "Doc, w'y dey do dot flyink by planyets?"
"It's the damn govermint," Sam Fireman said.
"Why not?" I said. "They got the Bowman Drive, why the hell shouldn't they use it? Serves 'em right." I had a double scotch and added: "Twenty years of it and they found out a few things they didn't know. Redlines are only one of them. Twenty years more, maybe they'll find out a few more things they didn't know. Maybe by the time there's a bathtub in every American home and an alcoholism clinic in every American town, they'll find out a whole lot of things they didn't know. And every American boy will be a pop-eyed, blood-raddled wreck, like our friend here, from riding the Bowman Drive."
"It's the damn govermint," Sam Fireman repeated.
"And what the hell did you mean by that remark about alcoholism?" Paddy said, real sore. "Personally, I can take it or leave it alone."
So we got to talking about that and everybody there turned out to be people who could take it or leave it alone.
* * * * *
It was maybe midnight when the kid showed at the table again, looking kind of dazed. I was drunker than I ought to be by midnight, so I said I was going for a walk. He tagged along and we wound up on a bench at Screwball Square. The soap-boxers were still going strong. Like I said, it was a nice night. After a while, a pot-bellied old auntie who didn't give a damn about the face sat down and tried to talk the kid into going to see some etchings. The kid didn't get it and I led him over to hear the soap-boxers before there was trouble.
One of the orators was a mush-mouthed evangelist. "And, oh, my friends," he said, "when I looked through the porthole of the spaceship and beheld the wonder of the Firmament--"
"You're a stinkin' Yankee liar!" the kid yelled at him. "You say one damn more word about can-shootin' and I'll ram your spaceship down your lyin' throat! Wheah's your redlines if you're such a hot spacer?"
The crowd didn't know what he was talking about, but "wheah's your redlines" sounded good to them, so they heckled mush-mouth off his box with it.
I got the kid to a bench. The liquor was working in him all of a sudden. He simmered down after a while and asked: "Doc, should I've given Miz Rorty some money? I asked her afterward and she said she'd admire to have something to remember me by, so I gave her my lighter. She seem' to be real pleased with it. But I was wondering if maybe I embarrassed her by asking her right out. Like I tol' you, back in Covington, Kentucky, we don't have places like that. Or maybe we did and I just didn't know about them. But what do you think I should've done about Miz Rorty?"
"Just what you did," I told him. "If they want money, they ask you for it first. Where you staying?"
"Y.M.C.A.," he said, almost asleep. "Back in Covington, Kentucky, I was a member of the Y and I kept up my membership. They have to let me in because I'm a member. Spacers have all kinds of trouble, Doc. Woman trouble. Hotel trouble. Fam'ly trouble. Religious trouble. I was raised a Southern Baptist, but wheah's Heaven, anyway? I ask' Doctor Chitwood las' time home before the redlines got so thick--Doc, you aren't a minister of the Gospel, are you? I hope I di'n' say anything to offend you."
"No offense, son," I said. "No offense."
I walked him to the avenue and waited for a fleet cab. It was almost five minutes. The independents that roll drunks dent the fenders of fleet cabs if they show up in Skid Row and then the fleet drivers have to make reports on their own time to the company. It keeps them away. But I got one and dumped the kid in.
"The Y Hotel," I told the driver. "Here's five. Help him in when you get there."
* * * * *
When I walked through Screwball Square again, some college kids were yelling "wheah's your redlines" at old Charlie, the last of the Wobblies.
Old Charlie kept roaring: "The hell with your breadlines! I'm talking about atomic bombs. Right--up--there!" And he pointed at the Moon.
It was a nice night, but the liquor was dying in me.
There was a joint around the corner, so I went in and had a drink to carry me to the club; I had a bottle there. I got into the first cab that came.
"Athletic Club," I said.
"Inna dawghouse, harh?" the driver said, and he gave me a big personality smile.
I didn't say anything and he started the car.
He was right, of course. I was in everybody's doghouse. Some day I'd scare hell out of Tom and Lise by going home and showing them what their daddy looked like.
Down at the Institute, I was in the doghouse.
"Oh, dear," everybody at the Institute said to everybody, "I'm sure I don't know what ails the man. A lovely wife and two lovely grown children and she had to tell him 'either you go or I go.' And drinking! And this is rather subtle, but it's a well-known fact that neurotics seek out low company to compensate for their guilt-feelings. The places he frequents. Doctor Francis Bowman, the man who made space-flight a reality. The man who put the Bomb Base on the Moon! Really, I'm sure I don't know what ails him."
The hell with them all.
* * *
Contents
CHAMELEON MAN
By Henry Kuttner
He was a changeable sort of fellow—and on occasions resembled a piecemeal zombie assembled by someone entirely ignorant of anatomy!
Tim Vanderhof wavered. He stood ten feet from a glass-paneled door, his apprehensive gaze riveted upon it, and swayed back and forth like a willow. Or, perhaps, an aspen. He wasn't sure. Yes, it was an aspen—a quaking aspen. His ears seemed to twitch gently as he listened to the low rumble of voices from the inner office of S. Horton Walker, president of The Svelte Shop, Fifth Avenue's snootiest establishment for supplying exclusive models of dresses, lingerie, and what-not.
Let us examine Mr. Vanderhof. He did not, at the moment, look like a man who, within a very short time, was going to turn into what amounted to something rather like a chameleon. Nevertheless, mentally and spiritually, Tim Vanderhof was a mere mass of quivering protoplasm, and no great wonder, after the interview he had just had. He wasn't bad looking, though slightly pallid. His features were regular, his face a bit chubby, and his eyes held the expression of a startled fawn. They were brown, like his hair, and he had a pug nose.
He shivered slightly as the glass-paneled door opened. A Back appeared. Under it were two short, slightly bowed legs, and it was surmounted by a scarlet billiard-ball of a head. There was no neck. The Bade was draped in tweeds, and a strong smell of tobacco, brandy, and horses emanated from it.
The Back extended a large, capable hand, clenched it into a fist, and shook it warningly at someone inside the office.
"Gad, sir!" a deep voice boomed, "Gad! This is the last straw! Mrs. Quester will be furious. And I warn you, Walker, that I shall be furious too. I have stood enough of your trifling. Twice already you promised exclusive models of a dress for my wife, and then failed to deliver."
"But—" said a Voice.
"Silence!" bellowed the Back, and the Voice was cowed. "You have promised Model Forty-Three to Mrs. Quester. If you dare to exhibit it at your fashion show this afternoon, I shall call upon you with a riding-whip. I shall be here after the show, and you will have the dress ready for me to take to Mrs. Quester. You have had enough time to make alterations. Gad, sir—in Burma I have had men broken—utterly broken—for less than this."
The Voice, with a faint spark of antagonism, rallied. It said, "But."
"But me no buts, damn your eyes! This isn't Burma, but you will find that Colonel Quester still knows how to use his fists—you tradesman! I shall be back this afternoon, and—brrrrmph!"
"Yes, Colonel," the Voice assented weakly, and the Back turned, revealing to the watching Vanderhof a round, crimson face with a bristling, iron-gray mustache, and beetling brows from beneath which lightning crackled menacingly. Brrmphing, Colonel Quester moved like a mastodon past the quaking Vanderhof and vanished through a door that seemed to open coweringly of its own accord at the man's advance. Vanderhof immediately turned and started to tiptoe away.
The Voice detected the sound of his departure. "Vanderhof!" it screamed. "Come here!"
Thus summoned, the unfortunate
official halted, retraced his steps, and entered the inner sanctum. There he paused like a hypnotized rabbit, watching the Voice, who was also known as S. Horton Walker, president of The Svelte Shop.
A hard man, S. Horton Walker. As a child. he had pulled the wings off butterflies, and maturity had not improved him. He looked like a shaved ape, with a bristling crop of blue-black hair and a gleaming, vicious eye that was now engaged in skinning Vanderhof.
"UIp," the later remarked, in a conciliatory tone.
"Don't give me that," Walker growled, crouching behind his desk like the gorilla he resembled. "I told you to keep that so-and-so out of my office. Well?"
"I said you were out," Vanderhof explained. "I—I—"
"You—you—" Walker mocked, pointing a stubby sausage of a finger. "Bah! And, again, bah! What the hell are you, a man or a jellyfish?"
"A man," Vanderhof said hopefully.
Walker's grunt was profoundly skeptical. "You"re a weakfish. A non-entity. By God, when I was your age I had twenty-nine men under me. By sheer force of personality I made myself what I am today. And I like men with drive—push—get-up-and-go."
Vanderhof, seeing an opportunity of escape, began to get-up-and-go, but relapsed at Walker's furious yelp. "Why, do you realize that Colonel Quester would have punched me in the eye if I hadn't impressed him with my personality? He's an outrageous person."
"You did promise those exclusive models to his wife though."
"We get a better price elsewhere," Walker said, and pondered. "But Model Forty-Three will be ready for him when he calls this afternoon. A dangerous man, the colonel. Where was I? Oh, yes. "You're a fool, Vanderhof."
Vanderhof nodded and looked like a fool. Walker groaned in exasperation. "Haven't you any personality at all? No, you haven't. You're a—a—a chameleon, that's what. I've noticed that before. When you're talking to a ditch-digger, you act like one yourself. When you're talking to a banker, you turn into a banker. You're a mirror, that's what!"