Far Out

by Damon Knight

  Johnny dug in his heels and stopped. “What’s the matter?” Duke inquired.

  “I just realized—I can’t go now. I’ll go tonight. I’ll take the late train.”

  Duke arched an eyebrow. “But why wait, Johnny? When the sunne shineth, make hay. When the iron is hot, strike. The tide tarrieth for no man.”

  “They’ll see me leave,” said Johnny, embarrassed.

  Duke frowned. “You mean the little green men actually are after you?” His features worked; he composed them with difficulty. “Well, this is—Pardon me. A momentary aberration. But now don’t you see, Johnny, you haven’t got any time to lose. If they’re following you, they must know where you live. How do you know they won’t come here?”

  Johnny, flushing, could think of no adequate reply. He had wanted to get away under cover of darkness, but that would mean another five hours at least…

  “Look here,” said Duke suddenly, “I know the very thing. Biff Feldstein—works at the Cherry Lane. Your own mother won’t admit she knows you. Wait here.”

  He was back in fifteen minutes, with a bundle of old clothes and an object which turned out, on closer examination, to be a small brown beard.

  Johnny put it on unwillingly, using gunk from a tube Duke had brought along. Duke helped him into a cast-off jacket, colour indistinguishable, shiny with grease, and clapped a beret on his head. The result, to Johnny’s horrified gaze, looked like an old-time Village phoney or a peddlar of French postcards. Duke inspected him judicially. “It’s magnificent, but it isn’t war,” he said. “However, we can always plant vines. Allons! I am the grass; I cover all!”

  Walking toward Sixth at a brisk pace, hand firmly on Johnny’s elbow, Duke suddenly paused. “Ho!” he said. He sprang forward, bent, and picked something up.

  Johnny stared at it glassily. It was a five-dollar bill.

  Duke was calmly putting it away. “Does that happen to you often?” Johnny asked.

  “Now and again,” said Duke. “Merely a matter of keeping the eyes in focus.”

  “Luck,” said Johnny faintly.

  “Never think of it,” Duke told him. “Take the word of an older and wiser man. You make your own luck in this world. Think of Newton. Think of O’Dwyer. Hand stuck in the jam jar? You asked for it. Now the trouble with you—”

  Johnny, who had heard this theory before, was no longer listening. Look, he thought, at all the different things that had had to happen so that Duke could pick up that fiver. Somebody had to lose it, to begin with—say because he met a friend just as he was about to put the bill away, and stuffed it in his pocket instead so he could shake hands, and then forgot it, reached for his handkerchief—All right. Then it just had to happen that everybody who passed this spot between then and now was looking the other way, or thinking about something else. And Duke, finally, had to glance down at just the right moment. It was all extremely improbable, but it happened, somewhere, every day.

  And also every day, somewhere, people were being hit by flowerpots knocked off tenth-storey window ledges, and falling down manholes, and walking into stray bullets fired by law enforcement officers in pursuit of malefactors. Johnny shuddered.

  “Oh-oh,” said Duke suddenly. “Where’s a cab? Ah—Cabby!” He sprang forward to the kerb, whistling and waving.

  Looking around curiously, Johnny saw a clumsy figure hurrying toward them down the street. “There’s Mary Finigan,” he said, pointing her out.

  “I know,” said Duke irascibly. The cab was just pulling in toward them, the driver reaching back to open the door. “Now here we go, Johnny—”

  “But I think she wants to talk to you,” said Johnny. “Hadn’t we—”

  “No time now,” said Duke, helping him in with a shove. “She’s taken to running off at the mouth—that’s why I had to give her up. Get moving!” he said to the driver, and added to Johnny, “Among other things, that is… Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience, and the King’s English.”

  As they pulled away into traffic, Johnny had a last glimpse of the girl standing on the kerb watching them. Her dark hair was straggling down off her forehead; she looked as if she had been crying.

  Duke said comfortably, “Every man, as the saying is, can tame a shrew but he that hath her. Now there, John boy, you have just had an instructive object lesson. Was it luck that we got away from that draggle-tailed earbender? It was not…”

  But, thought Johnny, it was. What if the cab hadn’t come along at just the right time?

  “… in a nutshell, boy. Only reason you have bad luck,you go hunting for it.”

  “That isn’t the reason,” said Johnny.

  He let Duke’s hearty voice fade once more into a kind of primitive background music, like the muttering of the extras in a Tarzan picture when the Kalawumbas are about to feed the pretty girl to the lions. It had just dawned on him, with the dazzling glow of revelation, that the whole course of anybody’s life was determined by improbable accidents. Here he stood, all five feet ten and a hundred and thirty pounds of him—a billion-to-one shot from the word go. (What were the chances against any given sperm’s uniting with any given ovum? More than a billion to one—unimaginable.) What if the apple hadn’t fallen on Newton’s head? What if O’Dwyer had never left Ireland? And what did free will have to do with the decision not to become, say, a Kurdish herdsman, if you happened to be born in Ohio?

  … It meant, Johnny thought, that if you could control the random factors—the way the dice fall in a bar in Sacramento, the temper of a rich uncle in Keokuk, the moisture content of the clouds over Sioux Falls at 3:03 CST, the shape of a pebble in a Wall Street newsboy’s sock—you could do anything. You could make an obscure painter named Johnny Bornish fall into the toyboat pond in Central Park and get red paint all over his shoe and knock down a pushcart…

  But why would you want to?

  The airport waiting room was a little like a scene out of Things to Come, except that the people were neither white-robed, leisurely nor cool.

  Every place on every bench was taken. Duke found a couple of square feet of floor space behind a pillar and settled Johnny there, seated on his upended suitcase.

  “Now you’re all set. Got your ticket. Got your magazine. Okay.” Duke made an abrupt menacing gesture in order to look at his wristwatch.

  “Got to run. Now, remember, boy, send me your address as soon as you get one, so I can forward your mail and so on. Oh, almost forgot.” He scribbled on a piece of paper, handed it over. “Mere formality. Payable at any time. Sign here.”

  He had written, “I O U $50.” Johnny signed, feeling a little more at home with Duke.

  “Right. Oll korrect.”

  “Duke,” said Johnny suddenly. “Mary’s pregnant, isn’t she?” His expression was thoughtful.

  “It has been known to happen,” said Duke good-humouredly.

  “Why don’t you give her a break?” Johnny asked with difficulty.

  Duke was not offended. “How? Speak the truth to me, Johnny—do you see me as a happy bridegroom? Well…” He pumped Johnny’s hand. “The word must be spoken that bids you depart—though the effort to speak it should shatter my heart—though in silence, with something I pine—yet the lips that touch liquor much never touch mine!” With a grin that seemed to linger, like the Cheshire cat’s, he disappeared into the crowd.

  II

  Uncomfortably astride his suitcase, solitary among multitudes, Johnny found himself thinking in words harder and longer at a time than he was used to. The kind of thinking he did when he was painting, or had painted, or was about to paint was another process altogether, and there were days on end when he did nothing else. He had a talent, Johnny Bornish. A talent is sometimes defined as a gift of the gods, a thing that most people, who have not had one, confuse with a present under a Christmas tree.

  It was not like that at all. It tortured and delighted him, and took up so much room in his skull that a lot of practical details couldn’t get in. Without exa
ggeration, it obsessed him, and when occasionally, as now, its grip relaxed, Johnny had the comical expression of a man who has just waked up to find his pocket picked and a row of hotfoot scars around his shoes.” .

  He was thinking about luck. It was all right to talk about everybody making his own, and to a certain extent he supposed it was true, but Duke was the kind of guy who found money on the street. Such a thing had happened to Johnny only once in his life, and then it wasn’t legal tender, but a Japanese coin—brass, heavy, about the size of a half dollar, with a chrysanthemum symbol on one side and a character on the other. He thought of it as his lucky piece; he had found it on the street, his last year in high school, and here—he took it out of his pocket—it still was.

  … Which, when you came to think of it, was odd. He was not superstitious about the coin, or especially fond of it. He called it a lucky piece for want of a better name, because the word keepsake had gone out of fashion; and in fact he believed that his luck in the last ten years had been lousy. The coin was the only thing he owned that was anywhere near that old. He had lost three wristwatches, numberless fountain pens, two hats, three or four cigarette lighters and genuine U.S. nickels and dimes by the handful. But here was the Japanese coin.

  Now, how could you figure a thing like that, unless it was luck… or interference?

  Johnny sat up straighter. It was a foolish notion probably born of the fact that he hadn’t had any lunch; but he was in a mood to read sinister significance into almost anything.

  He already knew that the old man and the tweedy woman had been interfering in his life for at least five years, probably longer. Somehow, they were responsible for the “accidents” that kept happening to him—and there was a foolish and sinister notion for you, if you liked. Believing that, how could he help wondering about other odd things that had happened to him, no matter how small—like finding and keeping the Japanese coin?

  With that kind of logic, you could prove anything. And yet, he couldn’t rid himself of the idea.

  Idly, he got up holding the coin and dropped it into a nearby waste can. He sat down on his suitcase again with a feeling of neurosis well quelled. If the coin somehow found its way back to him, he’d have evidence for thinking the worst of it; if it didn’t, as of course it wouldn’t, small loss.

  “Excuse me,” said a thinnish prim-faced little man in almost clerical clothes. “I believe you dropped this. A Japanese coin. Quite nice.”

  Johnny found his tongue. “Uh, thank you. But I don’t want it; you keep it.”

  “Oh, no,” said the little man, and walked stiffly away.

  Johnny stared after him, then at the coin. It was lumpishly solid, a dirty-looking brown, nicked and rounded at the edges. Ridiculous!

  His mistake, no doubt, had been in being too obvious. He palmed the coin, trying to look nonchalant. After a while he lighted a cigarette, dropped it, and as he fumbled for it, managed to shove the coin under the leg of the adjoining bench.

  He had taken one puff on the retrieved cigarette when a large hulk in a grey suit, all muscles and narrowed eyes, knelt beside him and extracted the coin. The hulk looked at it carefully, front and back; weighed it in his palm, rang it on the floor, and finally handed it over to Johnny. “This your?” he asked in a gravelly voice.

  Johnny nodded. The hulk said nothing more but watched grimly until Johnny put the coin away in his pocket. Then he got up, dusted off his knees, and went away into the crowd.

  Johnny felt a cold lump gather at the pit of his stomach. The fact that he had seen this same routine in at least half a dozen bad movies gave him no comfort; he did not believe in the series of natural coincidences that made it impossible to get rid of the neatly wrapped garbage, or the incriminating nylon stocking, or whatever.

  He stood up. It was already twenty minutes after his plane’s scheduled departure time. He had to get rid of the thing. It was intolerable to suppose that he couldn’t get rid of it. Of course he could get rid of it.

  The low false roof of the baggage counter looked promising. He picked up his suitcase and worked his way toward it, and got there just as the p. a. system burst forth with “Flight number mnglang for Buzzclickville, now loading at Gate Lumber Lide.” Under cover of this clamour, Johnny swiftly took the coin out of his pocket and tossed it out of sight on the roof.

  Now what? Was somebody going to fetch a ladder and climb up there after the coin, and come down and hand it to him?

  Nothing at all happened, except that the voice on the p. a. emitted its thunderous mutter again, and this time Johnny caught the name of his destination, Jacksonville.

  Feeling better, he stopped at the news-stand for cigarettes. He paid for them with a half dollar, which was promptly slapped back into his palm.

  “Flight mumble sixteen for Jagznbull, now loading at Gate Number Nine,” said the p. a.

  After a moment Johnny handed back the cigarettes, still staring at the Japanese coin that lay, infuriatingly solid, on his palm. He had had a fifty-cent piece in his pocket; it didn’t seem to be there now; ergo, he had thrown it up on top of the baggage counter. A natural mistake. Only, in ten years of carrying the coin around with him, he had never once mistaken it for a half-buck, or vice versa, until now.

  “Flight number sixteen…”

  The tweedy woman, Johnny realized with a slow chill crawling down his back, had been ahead of him in the art store, talking to a clerk. She couldn’t have been following him—on the bus, in a cab, or any other way; there wouldn’t have been time. She had known where he was going, and when he was going to get there.

  It was as if, he thought, while the coin seemed to turn fishily cold and smooth in his fingers, it was just as if the two of them, the tweedy woman and the old man, had planted a i sort of beacon on him ten years ago, so that wherever and whenever he went, he was a belled cat. It was as if they might be looking in a kind of radarscope, when it pleased them, and seeing the track of his life like a twisted strand of copper wire coiling and turning…

  But of course there was no escape, if that was true. His track went winding through the waiting room and onto a particular aircraft and down again, where that plane landed, and into a particular room and then a particular restaurant, so that a day from now, a month, a year, ten years from now, they could reach out and touch him wherever he might be.

  There was no escape, because there was a peculiarity built into this brown Japanese coin, a combination of random events that added up to the mirth-provoking result that he simply couldn’t lose it.

  He looked around wildly, thinking, Blowtorch. Monkey wrench. Sledge hammer. But there wasn’t anything. It was a great big phoney Things-to-Comeish wildcat-airline waiting room, without a tool in it anywhere.

  A pretty girl came out from behind the counter to his right, by swinging up the hinged section of counter and letting it down again behind her. Johnny stared after her stupidly, then at !i the way she had come out. His scalp twitched. He stepped to the counter, raised the hinged section.

  A bald man a few feet away stopped talking to wave a telephone handset at Johnny. “No admittance here, sir! No admittance!”

  Johnny put the Japanese coin down at an angle on the place that supported the end of the hinged section. He made sure it was the Japanese coin. He wedged it firmly.

  The bald man dropped his telephone and came toward him, hand outstretched.

  Johnny slammed the hinged section down as hard as he could. There was a dull bonk, and an odd feeling of tension; the lights seemed to blur. He turned and ran. Nobody followed him.

  The plane was a two-engined relic that looked faintly Victorian from the outside; inside, it was a slanting dark cavern with an astonishing number of seats crammed into it. It smelled like a locker room. Johnny stumbled down the narrow aisle to what seemed to be the only remaining place, next to a large dark gentleman in an awning-striped tie.

  He sat down, a little awkwardly. He had had a peculiar feeling ever since he had bashed the coin with
the counter section, and the worst of it was that he couldn’t pin it down. It was a physical something-wrong feeling, like an upset stomach or too little sleep or a fever coming on, but it wasn’t exactly any of those things. He was hungry, but not that hungry. He thought the trouble might be with his eyes, but whenever he picked out anything as a test, it looked perfectly normal and he could see it fine. It was in his skin, perhaps? A kind of not-quite-prickling that… No, it wasn’t his skin.

  It was a little like being drunk, at the fraction of an instant when you realize how drunk you are and regret it—it was like that, but not very much. And it was partly like the foreboding, stronger and more oppressive than before—Something bad was going to happen.

  The pilot and co-pilot walked up the aisle and disappeared into the forward compartment. The door was shut; the stewardess, back in the tail, was poring over the papers on her clipboard. After a while the starters whined and the engines came to life; Johnny, who had flown only once before, and on a scheduled airline at that, was startled to find what a devil of a racket they made. There was another interminable wait, and then the plane was crawling forward, swinging its nose around, crawling a little faster, while an endless blank expanse of concrete slipped by—lumbering along, then, like some huge, preposterous and, above all, flightless bird—and lifting incredibly, a few inches up, airborne, the runway falling back, tilted, dwindling until they were up, high above the mist on the water, steady as a hammock in the rasping monotone drone of the engines.

  Something went flip at the comer of Johnny’s vision. He turned his head.

  Flop.

  It was a little metallic disk that went flip up the carpet like a tiddly-wink or a Mexican jumping bean, and paused for an instant while his jaw began to come loose at the hinge, and went flop. It lay on the carpet next to his seat, and went hop.