Instead of answering, the Guardian walked over to a control panel and punched a series of buttons. A moment later a large screen over his head lit up.
“The playback starts here.”
The screen flickered and then steadied to show a hospital delivery room and a writhing woman strapped to a table.
“What’s all this got to do with me?”
“R&R have to start your processing someplace. This is what’s planned for your next run-through. In your case 1 imagine some special arrangements have been made.”
They had been. When Blotz started making little mewling noises, the little man reached forward and turned a knob. The screen went dark.
“Had enough?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said the other thickly, “but I got to know.” He shuddered. “Go ahead and hit the high spots. Nothing could be worse than what I just saw.”
The Guardian did. There were things that could be worse. Much worse.
“Why?” whispered Blotz when it was finally over. “Why?”
“Because the ethical universe is just as orderly as the physical one. For each action there is an equal and contrary— though delayed—reaction.”
Blotz fought frantically against the hysteria that threatened to engulf him. Always in the past there had been something that could be twisted to his advantage. The present had to be the same. There had to be an angle here. There had to be! Desperately he ran over the events of the past quarter hour, trying to find something that didn’t fit the pattern as the little man had presented it.
The re-editing! There had to be something in the re-editing!
“Look,” he stammered. “You can change things. You did for Janie. Why can’t you go back over my tape and take out all the really bad things?”
“Because the past can’t be changed,” said the little man impatiently. “The re-editing that you have a right to applies only to the future. And as I’ve already pointed out, yours is so limited that any adjustment I might make would have very little meaning.”
Blotz took a deep breath and held it. He couldn’t afford to panic. Not now. But where was the angle? Given that the past couldn’t be changed. Given that once he returned to Earth he had only a half a minute of life left. What then? How could a tape be kept from ending?
Say he’d bugged a bedroom to collect evidence for a divorce case and say he didn’t want to miss recording a single squeak. Maybe if he… .
Of course!
“I’ve got a little job for you,” he said in a voice that quivered slightly in spite of his best efforts to control it. “I want you to do some splicing.”
The little man looked at him in obvious bewilderment. “Splicing?”
Blotz was still shaky but he was beginning to enjoy himself. “That’s what I said. It just occurred to me that if you spliced a second tape on to the end of the one that’s just about finished, I could keep on living.” He gestured toward the blank screen. “And after your little preview, keeping on living is what I want most to do. The splicing, it can be done, can’t it?”
“Can? Of course it can. But I’m not about to,” he added angrily. “To begin with, your old body’s worn out and I’d have to hunt you up a new one.”
“So what ? The thing I want to hang on to is the me, the part that does the feeling and thinking, the part that knows.” A snarl came into his voice. “And don’t tell me you won’t. You’ve got to!” He waved the bronze cylinder under the little man’s nose. “I came up with the brass ring, Buster, and I got a free ride coming.”
He stopped suddenly and a look of awe came over his face. “A free ride? And why only one, when I can keep on swapping horses?” He laughed exultantly. “Why, if you keep on splicing? Listen, here’s the word. Every time the tape that’s running through the recorder is about to reach its end. I want a new one patched on. And make sure that each body I get is well-heeled, healthy, and handsome. Like I said before, I like to travel first class.”
The little man seemed on the verge of tears. “It’s not a good idea,” he said. “It’s not a good idea at all. I can barely keep up with my work as it is, and if I have to—”
“But you do have to,” said Blotz viciously. “Whether you like it or not. I’ve just beat the system. Me, little Al Blotz, the guy that used to have to work penny-ante swindles just to keep eating. But no more! What was chalked up against me before is peanuts compared to what’s coming. And you know why? Because Reward and Punishment can’t process me until my tape comes to an end. And it ain’t ever. Never!”
“But—”
“Get going!”
The Guardian threw up his hands in defeat. “It’s going to make a lot of extra work for me,” he said mournfully, “but if you in—”
“Sure I insist,” said Blotz, holding resolutely onto the cylinder. “You can tell Reward and Punishment to go process itself. I got it made.”
The little machine that kept track of Mr. Blotz’s actions hesitated momentarily when it came to the splice, and then gave a loud click and began to record on the new section of tape.
CLICK!
He woke to something heavy pressing on his chest and an angry buzzing. Blotz—no longer Blotz as far as externals went—opened sleepy eyes and blinked up at the ugly wedge-shaped head that was reared back ready to strike.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were expecting company, Carl?” There was a note of savage enjoyment in the soft voice from the other side of the campfire.
Blotz wanted to beg, to plead with the other to save him, but he didn’t dare risk the slightest lip movement. The snake was angry. One little motion and it would strike.
“I was going to kill you, Carl,” the quiet voice went on. “I was going to damn my immortal soul to save the world from you. But now I don’t have to. I’m just a spectator. Sometime before too long you’re going to have to move. When you do it will be horrible, but it won’t last more than a few hours. That’s more than you granted the others. Remember my sister, Carl? And how long it took?”
The involuntary movement that was the prelude to agony was accompanied by a momentary feeling of relief. At least before too long it would be over. But with the final convulsion there came a CLICK!
He was strangling. With a convulsive kick he brought himself to the surface and spat out a mouthful of blood-tinged salt water. To his left small bits of debris bobbed up and down in the oil slick that marked the spot where his cabin cruiser had gone down. He paddled in an aimless circle, unable to strike out because of the splintered rib that lanced into one lung. Almost an hour passed before the first black dorsal fin came circling curiously in.
The Guardian yawned as he looked around for another bit of tape to splice on to the one that was almost finished. Young, healthy, handsome—there were enough odd ends around so that Blotz would never have to worry about dying, never in a million years.
Not dying, that was something else.
CLICK!
We live in liberated times, when women no longer must be married to be considered whole. At least, that’s what the media, and the psychologist-writers, and the feel-good analysts all say. And to a large extent that’s certainly true, and all to the good.
But it’s not a universal sediment, as a professor of social geology might say. There are still plenty of single ladies who devoutly wish they were otherwise, not because they feel incomplete without a man in their lives but because it is better not to be lonely than to be. Trouble is, men today are often confused about their roles. The times and traditions, they are still a-changin’. Respectable heterosexual pickings, as many women will tell you these days, tend to the slim.
Standards of male and female beauty also change. Dustin Hoffman and A1 Pacino, after all, are not Clark Gable and Cary Grant. So how important in these “sensitive” times are looks, anyway?
Ms. Lipshutz and the Goblin
MARVIN KAYE
Lipshutz. Daphne A., Ms. (age: 28; height: 5′ 2″; weight: 160 lbs.; must wear corrective lenses), ha
d frizzy brown hair, buck teeth, and an almost terminal case of acne. Though her mother frequently reassured her she had a Very Nice Personality, that commodity seemed of little value in Daphne’s Quest for The Perfect Mate.
According to Daphne A. (for Arabella) Lipshutz, The Perfect Mate must be 30, about 5′ 9″ in height, weigh approximately 130 pounds, have wavy blond hair (1st preference), white teeth, a gentle smile and peaches-and-cream complexion. He must like children and occasional sex, or if necessary, the other way around.
Daphne’s Quest for The Perfect Mate was hampered by her job as an interviewer (2nd grade) for the State of New York, Manhattan division of the Labor Department’s Upper West Side office of the Bureau of Unemployment. The only men she met there were sour-stomached married colleagues, or the people she processed for unemployment checks, “and them,” her mother cautioned, “you can do without. Who’d buy the tickets, tip the cabbie, shmeer the headwaiter, pick up the check?”
Ms. Lipshutz worked in a dingy green office around the comer from a supermarket. To get there, she had to take a southbound bus from The Bronx, get off at 90th and Broadway and walk west past a narrow, dark alley. Next to it was a brick building with a doorway providing access to steep wooden stairs that mounted to her office. The stairs were worn smooth and low in the middle of each step by innumerable shuffling feet. Daphne noticed that unemployed feet frequently shuffle.
Late one October afternoon, just before Hallowe’en, Ms. Lipshutz was about to take her final coffee-break of the day when an unusual personage entered the unemployment bureau and approached her window. He was six feet eight inches tall and thin as a breadstick. There were warts all over his body, and the color of his skin was bright green.
Ms. Lipshutz thought he looked like the Jolly Green Pickle or an elongated cousin of Peter Pain. He was certainly the ugliest thing she’d ever set her soulful brown eyes on.
Leaning his pointy elbows on her window-shelf, the newcomer glanced admiringly at her acne-dimpled face and asked whether he was in the correct line. He addressed her as Miss.
Bridling, Daphne told him to address her as Ms. The tall green creature’s eyebrows rose.
“Miz?” he echoed, mystified. “What dat?”
“I am a liberated woman,” she said in the clockwork rhythm of a civil servant or a missioned spirit. Her vocal timbre was flat and nasal, pure Grand Concourse. “I do not like to be called Miss. If I were married—” (here she betrayed her cause with a profound sigh) u—1 would not call myself Mrs. So please call me Ms.”
The green one nodded. “Me once had girlfriend named Miz. Shlubya Miz. She great big troll. You troll?”
“This,” said Ms. Lipshutz, “is an immaterial conversation. Please state your name and business.”
“Name: Klotsch.”
“Would you repeat that?” she asked, fishing out an application form and poising a pencil.
“Klotsch.”
“First or last?”
“Always!”
Unusual names were common at the unemployment office, and so was unusual stupidity. Ms. Lipshutz patiently explained she wanted to know whether Klotsch was a first or last name.
“Only name. Just Klotsch.”
“How do you spell it? Is that C as in Couch?”
“K as in Kill!” Klotsch shouted. “Kill-LOTSCH!” “Kindly lower your voice,” she said mechanically. “I presume you wish to apply for unemployment checks?” Spreading his warty hands, the big green thing grinned. “Klotsch not come to count your pimples, Miz.”
Not realizing the remark was meant flirtatiously, Daphne, who was extremely sensitive about her acne, took offense. “That was a cruel thing to say!”
“How come?” Klotsch was puzzled.
“Me no understand. Klotsch like pimples. You lots cuter than Shlubya the troll!”
Daphne, not very reassured, found it wise to retreat into the prescribed formulae of the State of New York for dealing with an unemployment insurance applicant. “Now,” she began. “Mister Klotsch—”
He waved a deprecatory claw. “No Mister.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You liberated, so okay, Klotsch liberated, too. If you Miz, me Afwrr.”
“I see,” she said primly, unable to determine whether she was being made fun of. Inscribing Klotsch’s name on Form NYS204-A, Ms. Lipshutz requested his address.
“Not got.”
“You are a transient?”
He shook his shaggy head. “Me are a goblin.”
“No, no, Murr Klotsch, we are not up to Employment History yet. Simply state your address.”
“Me don’t got. Landlady kick me out of cave.”
“Oh, dear. Couldn’t you pay your rent?”
“Ate landlord,” Klotsch glumly confessed.
Daphne suddenly noticed that Klotsch had two lower incisors which protruded three inches north of his upper lip. Civic conscience aroused, she told him eating his landlord was a terrible thing to do.
“Telling me! Klotsch sick three days.”
“Do you go round eating people all the time?”
The goblin drew himself erect, his pride hurt. “Klotsch no eat people! Only landlords!”
Ms. Lipshutz conceded the distinction. Returning to the form, she asked Klotsch for his last date of employment. He sighed gloomily. “October 31st, 1877.”
Time to be Firm: “The unemployment relief act, Murr Klotsch, does not cover cases prior to 1932.”
“So put down 1932,” he suggested. In an uncharacteristic spirit of compromise, Daphne promptly complied. (It was eight minutes before five o’clock.)
“Place of previous employment?”
“Black Forest.”
“Is that in New York?”
“Is Germany.”
“You may not be aware that the State of New York does not share reciprocity with overseas powers.”
Klotsch thought about it briefly, then raised a crooked talon in recollection. “Once did one-night gig in Poughkeepsie.”
“Check.” She wrote it down. “Previous employer’s name.”
“Beelzebub.”
Ms. Lipshutz stuck pencil and application in Klotsch’s paws. “Here—you tackle that one!” While he wrote, she studied him, deciding that, after all, Klotsch wasn’t so bad looking. He had a kind of sexy expression in his big purple eye.
“And where does this Mist—uh, Murr Beelzebub conduct his business?”
The goblin shrugged. “Usually hangs around Times Square.”
“Then he does not maintain a permanent place of business?”
“Oh, yeah: further south.” Klotsch shook his large head, scowling. “He no good boss, got all goblins unionized. Me no like. Klotsch work for self.”
Ms. Lipshutz muttered something about scabs. Klotsch, misunderstanding, beamed toothily. “Klotsch got plenty scabs. You like?”
Eye on the clock (four of five), Ms. Lipshutz proceeded with her routine. “Have you received any recent employment offers?”
“Just Beelzebub.”
“Do you mean,” she inquired with the frosty, lofty disapproval of an accredited representative of the State of New York, “that you have refused a job offer?”
“Me no going to shovel coal!” Klotsch howled, eyes glowing like the embers he disdained.
Ms. Lipshutz understood. “So long as the position was not in your chosen professional line. ” She ticked off another question on the form. “That brings us, Murr Klotsch, to the kind of work you are seeking. What precisely do you do?” He replied in a solemn guttural tone. “Me goblin.” “What does that entail?”
By way of demonstration, Klotsch uttered a fearful yell, gnashed his teeth and dashed up and down the walls. He panted, snorted, whistled, screamed, swung from the light fixtures and dripped green on various desks. Ms. Lipshutz’s colleagues paid no attention. Worse things happen in Manhattan.
Gibbering his last gibber, Klotsch returned to Ms. Lipshutz’s window. “That my Class A material. You like?
” “Interesting,” she conceded. “Did you get much call for that sort of thing?”
“Plenty work once! Double-time during day! Klotsch used to frighten farmers, shepherds, even once in a while, genuine hero.” He sighed, shrugging eloquently. “But then scare biz go down toilet. They bust me down to kids, then not even them. Too many other scary things nowadays, goblins outclassed.”
She nodded, not without hasty sympathy (two of five). “And have you ever considered changing your profession?” “Got plenty monsters already on tv, movies, comics.” “What about the armed services?”
Klotsch shook his big green head. “All the best jobs already got by trolls.”
Ms. Lipshutz sighed. She would have liked to assist Klotsch, but it was 4:59 and she did not want to miss the 5:03 bus. Setting his form aside for processing the following day, she asked him to return in one week.
The hapless goblin shambled out without another word.
*
Ms. Lipshutz hurried on her coat and hat, locked up her desk, pattered swiftly down the old stairs to catch the 5:03.
Turning east, she heel-clicked toward Broadway. There was a dark alleyway separating the comer supermarket from the building that housed the unemployment bureau. As she passed it, a great green goblin leaped out at her, whoofling, snorting and howling in outrageous menace.
Daphne nearly collapsed with laughter. She snickered, tittered, chortled and giggled for nearly a minute before gaining sufficient self-control to speak. “Mure Klotsch … it’s you!”
His face was sad and long. “Miz no scared, she laugh.”
“Oh … oh, no!” Daphne consolingly reached out her hand and touched him. “Murr Klotsch … I was so, so frightened!”
“Then why you laugh?”
“I was positively … uh … hysterical with fear!”
The goblin grinned shyly, hopefully. “No kidding?”
“Truly,” she declared firmly, coyly adding, “I don’t believe my heart will stop pounding until I’ve had a drink.”
Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves Page 11