Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  “Go on,” the old witch said.

  Outside the window the night trembled, waiting.

  The shadows came out to dance and chant, and Shelia went to the opals and took one down, and the old witch cackled and lit the tallow candle with a kitchen match, and the smoke had a greasy smell.

  And the sour swamp air came in, and the distant call of a loon, and the hungry lap of water, and the slither of movement.

  Outside the moon topped the buildings and shone down, a cold, barren, passionless, knowledgeless jewel of infinity.

  Shelia drank again, and “then she stumbled over a shadow.

  The shadow led her, and she was in the kitchen with the electric iron in her hand, and reverently she lay the largest opal of all on the linoleum and raised the electric iron, and the witch rent the air with hysterical laughter, and the electric iron came savagely down.

  And Gib wept at her funeral.

  UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT

  Two of the Great Clichés of modern science fiction are that human mutants will spring from the release of atomic radiations, and that the telepathic mutant will he an invincible superman. Kris Neville has been shrewd enough to realize that mutations have long been occurring from uncomprehended but certainly pre-Alamogordo sources, and that telepathy may be not a source of power, but rather a tormenting curse—and from these realisations he has wrought a melodrama of future conflicts all the more terrifying for its quietly realistic understatement.

  ON THE SEAT beside him, the brief case bounced and jiggled. He was driving over an old section of road. It had been last repaired in 1950, and unless the government shortly assigned precious manpower to its renovation, it would within another year disintegrate completely beneath the endless pressure of commuter traffic. He stepped down more heavily on the accelerator. The rebuilt engine began to knock.

  He hoped his vacation authorization would be lying on the desk he shared with Robert Edd. He could be on a plane for South America by six o’clock. Tomorrow afternoon he would be settled in some tiny time-forgotten village. With the language barrier between him and the natives, he would be isolated for the first time in two years from the ever present pressure of minds unconsciously crying for his sympathy.

  To his left and ahead, now that he was almost at the city limits, lay the smooth lawn and white marble monuments of a tree-shaded cemetery.

  When the car came abreast, he felt for the second time since breakfast a sharp, pain-like buzzing in his mind. This time it seemed almost to be half formed thoughts, and there was an attendant impression of agony and heat that brought perspiration to his palms. He grappled with it for a moment, trying to understand it, and then it was gone as suddenly as it had come. He shook his head puzzled and afraid. It was too soon for pain.

  Inside the city, traffic grew heavier. At Clay Street, he turned left. Seven blocks down, he located the address he wanted. He drew the car to the curb, picked up the brief case, and got out.

  As he walked toward the porch, he imagined the face behind the door. He imagined it in terms of hair color, eye color, ear shape and bone structure. He knocked, hoping to find that the man inside had green hair, orange eyes, pronged ear lobes.

  “Yes?” the man said, peering out from behind the half opened door.

  He felt his heart pulse at the sight of the expected face. He said, “Mr. Merringo?”

  “Yes,” the man said, and his voice was dead and listless.

  “My name is Wilson. Howard Wilson. May I come in?”

  “You’re a telepath?” Mr. Merringo said. His voice was still flat and indifferent, but the left side of his mouth quivered with distrust.

  “I will not invade the privacy of your thoughts,” Howard Wilson said. He had been saying the same formal sentence through a terrifying eternity of faces, and yet each time he felt a fresh anger at the implication which made it necessary.

  The man hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then the door swung inward. “Come in,” he said sullenly.

  In silence Howard Wilson followed him down the narrow hall. His nostrils wrinkled at the stale air, and his eyes were momentarily stunned by the curtained gloom.

  Mr. Merringo, a thin, nervous, thirtyish man who walked as if the carpet were insecure, turned left into the living room, which opened off the hall by way of sliding doors, one panel of which was extended. He crossed to the ornamental fireplace. It was littered with nervously twisted paper balls and half smoked cigarettes and ashes and a single, shriveled apple core. He turned to face the telepath. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his mouth was bloodless. “You’re from the government? I read somewhere that they hire you.”

  Howard Wilson glanced at the mirror and saw the ridiculous bump on his forehead, round and blue, like a newly discolored bruise. It was the emblem of a telepath, and it grew, cancerous, from the twentieth year of his life. It would destroy him, eating inward to his mind and shooting malignant cells into his blood for impartial distribution to lungs and stomach and bones, before he was forty. His mouth remained emotionless as he tried to imagine the bump away, and to recall his clear, adolescent forehead in the days before he matured into hearing thoughts he did not want to hear. The mirror image peered back at him, nature’s mistake, a false, evolutionary start, unproductive. He turned to the man at the fireplace.

  “Yes,” he said. “I work for the government.” And my employers, he might have added, fear and distrust me more than you do. For them I gather information in the slippery, sterile field of espionage and counterespionage. I carry ashes dead beyond breathing upon. “Please don’t be alarmed by my telepathic ability,” he said. “I will not use it here; I do not use it often; I would prefer never to use it at all.”

  “I can’t understand why the government would be interested in me.”

  “It’s about your wife,” Howard Wilson said, steeling himself uselessly against pity.

  Mr. Merringo stared into the telepath’s eyes. No flicker betrayed his emotion, but Howard Wilson could feel it, in a quick pulse, and Howard Wilson’s mind was sealed.

  “Please sit down,” Mr. Merringo said.

  “Thank you.”

  Howard Wilson crossed to the sofa. As he sat down, he noticed the faint dust released by the pressure of his body. Looking around the room, his eyes accustomed now to the dimness, he knew that it had not been cleaned or aired for a month or more, and the furniture seemed stiff and cold.

  “I’ve not been myself,” Mr. Merringo said. “Not these past few weeks. Perhaps you can understand the shock . . .?”

  Howard Wilson avoided his eyes.

  “I hope you’ll pardon the appearance of the room,” Mr. Merringo said indifferently.

  “I’m sorry to bother you at all,” Howard Wilson said. He tried to relax. He stroked the brief case on his lap. “I got your name from the hospital.”

  “I understand.”

  “Please forgive this necessary question: But you were the father?”

  Mr. Merringo seemed about to spring across the room at the telepath. For the first time his eyes were alive. Slowly he forced himself to relax. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I was the father.”

  Howard Wilson let the tension die on the stale and silent air. His hand fumbled at the zipper of the brief case; he knew without looking that the man was staring hard at his face. His hand jerked, and the zipper caught, and as he bent, focusing a part of his attention on it, he wondered what they expected him to be, people like Merringo and the rest: what cold, unfeeling creature; what super intelligence, what icy, emotionless entity, human in form, demon in mind? He could feel the hostile eyes seem to say, You understand, damn you, and you’re laughing at me . . . But his I. Q. was 120, and he could not understand or interpret any more than anyone else of equal intelligence. He got the zipper free. He drew out the data sheet.

  “I’d like to enter a few facial descriptions, if you don’t mind, Mr. Merringo . . . If you’ll stand still, please.”

  And after a few moments of in
spection and recording, he said, “Turn your head in profile, please . . . That’s good.”

  Then he was done. “Do you have a recent picture of Mrs. Merringo?”

  “. . . yes,” Mr. Merringo said. He turned listlessly to the shelf above the ornamental fireplace.

  Howard Wilson passed a hand across his eyes. There was the static-electric half pain-like shock in his telepathic sense again. It made a variegated blur behind his eyes. It passed. He stared at his hand. It was shaking. He began to feel ill.

  The doctor had said—during the final, fatal examination when he was twenty-one—“The pain will be toward the end.”

  He shook himself. It was not knowledge of death alone that was frightening; men had died before. But he, along with the no more than two dozen other telepaths, all male, all recently come to maturity and under scrutiny, were left to move forward to an uncharted death without previous clue or case history. Nature, like an inefficient potter casting aside thoughtlessly the imperfect instrument, had erred; man was helpless before her. It was the unknown quality that was most frightening. He rubbed his forehead with a moist hand. It was too early for pain.

  “Here is the picture,” Mr. Merringo said.

  Howard Wilson took it automatically. After his heart quieted, he began to enter details on the data sheet. He forced himself to concentrate on the job. “Now, what color was her hair?”

  Mr. Merringo told him.

  Howard Wilson frowned and glanced quickly at his other data sheet, checking off, mentally, the other factors to eliminate. Only one, now, remained, upon which the whole examination turned.

  “Her eyes?”

  Mr. Merringo told him.

  “Thank you,” Howard Wilson said. “You have been very cooperative.”

  Walking toward his car, Howard Wilson felt clammy. He opened the car door, tossed in his brief case, eased behind the wheel, pressed back against the worn seat cover, and glancing at his watch, decided to postpone the meal until after seeing Miss Ethel Wilberston, sister of the late Edith Collins, whose husband, Emanuel, had jumped in front of a subway train in the East two weeks ago.

  He glanced back at the house of Mr. Merringo, seeing a “For Sale” sign slightly awry in the yard. And he wondered why it was that humans always blamed themselves? Instead of eye color or bone structure or God. But he knew the answer. There was something in them individualistic, proud, fierce, terrible, demanding admiration, and yet, pathetic.

  As his foot pressed the snarling starter, he closed his eyes wearily, remembering the negative report from South Africa that had been forwarded to him for his information. He was aware of the conceit of pride when one man presumes to speak for a thousand square miles, cabling, in code: “It hasn’t happened here,” after consulting a government man in a light, white suit, drinking, perhaps, gin and quinine to avoid a disease or to keep slightly drunk and only half aware of the high, hot sun and the shimmering, steamy forest beyond the cities and the farms and the flat grass lands.

  Opening his eyes, he shifted into low. As the car began to move, he created the scene, detail by detail. The Chieftain, tall, ebony, Oxford educated, seated in tribal glory, surrounded by the squalid bamboo village and his callous-footed subjects. From across the dusty pavillion, a glistening husband cries that his wife is dead in childbirth. And the Chieftain, still half believing in spirits, perhaps, summons the medicine man. Together they go to the spot; together they see the silent newborn thing cuddled in a wrapping of afterbirth; and after a moment, the Chieftain orders, “Bury it.” While a white man far away says in a guttural Dutch accent, “Nothing of that sort has occurred here, thank God.”

  Howard Wilson threaded his way through traffic to the home of Miss Ethel Wilberston to see if her sister’s eyes had been the same color as all the other women’s.

  But the sister was not home, and sticky with the afternoon heat, he drove to the office, unhungry, and suddenly tired and enervated by a growing headache.

  The office was in the Federal Building, on the third floor, two rooms above the First National Bank and a branch office for a drug chain.

  He had worked out of the office during most of the past year, trying, along with Robert Edd, to break up the opium traffic from Mexico. They had been assigned to the project because someone, somewhere, had decided that the opium traffic was a Communist plot. A little over a month ago they had been reassigned to the investigation of the suddenly appeared mutant wave.

  Two of the three district FBI men were in the office when he came in, and they broke off their conversation and glanced at him uneasily. He did not like them, and beneath their automatic smiles of recognition, he knew that it was a mutual dislike. He had never answered their smug, suggestive questions: What’s that dame thinking, down there? I’d like to know if maybe she isn’t thinking about . . . For it always made him shudder and shrink inward, incapable of explaining the morass of conscious thought and the turmoil of half conscious thought and the deeper, emotionally colored surges that made up the human mind. And under the surface, like a deep, fast current, was a common flow of hope and love and generosity cutting through the turgid intermingling of despair and hate and selfishness.

  It left Howard Wilson mute and afraid; for he saw himself reflected, and the reflection was naked and beyond his judgement.

  He put the brief case on the desk and took out the data sheets. His vacation application had not come back.

  “I could have checked that guy for you,” one of the FBI men said. Without looking up, Howard Wilson said, “I had nothing to do.”

  After an uneasy moment, the other agent said, “Find anything new?”

  “It’s narrowed down to eye color.”

  “Oh? What do you think?”

  Howard Wilson shrugged, feeling itchy and uncomfortable between his shoulder blades. “I couldn’t say.”

  “Okay, okay. Just asking. Skip it.”

  Suddenly tense and irritable, Howard Wilson clenched his fists at his sides. “I don’t . . .” He had started to say in a burst of unreasoning anger, I don’t think they know anything about it and I don’t think they ever will. It was an involuntary thought, but once it came into his mind, he recognized that until now he had been afraid to admit it even to himself. He felt personally involved and knotted up inside whenever he thought about the mutants. “Never mind,” he said.

  “It was the Bomb,” the first of the FBI men said.

  Howard Wilson remained quiet, wondering which of the hundred or so of the Bombs he was talking about.

  “Don’tyou think so?”

  Howard Wilson shrugged.

  The teletype in the far corner of the room began to chatter, and the two FBI men crossed to it. The message rolled out, over the clicking keys, in coded groups.

  “The Tokyo report on your stuff,” one said to Howard Wilson. “Want to look at it when it’s decoded?”

  “. . . no,” Howard Wilson said.

  Fifteen years after the Alamogordo Air Base mushroom, they were checking in Phoenix; and hopefully interviewing Bikini natives; and Las Vegas citizens; and Nome residents. While, from secrecy-cloaked sources, reports filtered in from Mexico, Canada, England, France, Germany, and perhaps, too, from behind the Iron Curtain. In less than a month, a hundred-hundred quiet investigations, with not a ripple in the world press, while tense men in Washington moved pins and drew circles.

  “See if there’s any in Japan,” they had doubtless instructed, intending to prove, if there were, that a pair of atom blasts accounted for them.

  While Russia bristled menace at Greece from overrun Yugoslavia, and Western Germany champed at the light Allied reins. And the world, asunder, quivered, waiting, and each action was a potential spark for the powder line.

  Howard Wilson remembered looking right from the Customs Building out over Yokohama, watching fishing boats and barges crowd into the muddy canal (or was that over by the Sakurigecho Station, where you got the train to Tokyo?) watching Yokohama and listening to the rattle of wi
nches and the whine of cable from the docks. The air had a sweet, not altogether pleasant, fishy smell. The natives said, sullen-polite, “ha-so-deska?” and “arigato” and bowed deeply. They made Howard Wilson uneasy, because he could never be sure he understood them at all, and could never be sure that his failure was not an indictment of himself.

  Their eyes were black and beady, but, in the last few months, they had probably buried things in their queer Buddhist grave yards and planted totem sticks over the unknown inside their Gates of Eternity. And probably, too, in cold northern Hokkaido, across the narrow straits from fortress Sakhalin, the Ainu piled snow on deformed mutants and remained silent, while, in the southern part, a Hawaiian interpreter under US Government orders asked the governor, who answered respectfully. “There have been no reports here, either.”

  Suddenly Howard Wilson knew the immensity of the issue and the futility of seeking the easy explanation in terms of the way things were supposed to happen or had always happened. The Bomb was not the cause, because he had been born before the first one. And there had been the mutant increase in the early forties: odd calves, and queer insects and unique wheat, and flies that began to resist DDT. And the increasing percentage of hereditary cancer. The early, beginning wave of it was easily explained in isolation—for no one would more than chuckle at the bizarre animal discovered in Los Angeles in 1939 that looked to be half racoon and half beaver; and few people would seriously doubt any well established theory merely because what was almost a whale washed ashore dead (of maladaptation, perhaps?) on the Oregon coast.

  The FBI men were eyeing him sullenly.

  “I’m going home,” he said. “You know the number if you want me.” He was angry at them, and angry that the government had not approved his vacation application. He wanted to get away for a few weeks and relax and think things out.

  The office was silent.

  The one FBI man moved toward the data sheets on the table, and Howard Wilson said, without looking directly at him, “It isn’t your wife’s eye color.”