Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  Alf said nothing.

  “They don’t mind you asking. Take it from me; they don’t mind.” The photographer’s tone was aggressive to forestall contradiction. He made moist, kissing sounds. “Maybe this one’s one of them bobby-soxers. Hot stuff. I covered a motel row back in ’49. Regular little tiger. The guy with her was wanted on the Bronson stick-up. She played ball, so I played ball.”

  “The Old Man don’t go for that,” Alf said.

  Gil, mouth open, snorted heavily. “What the hell? What’s one picture more or less?”

  To the left, the bare bones of a projected apartment house cast an insubstantial shadow.

  “You got a wife,” Alf said quietly.

  Gil chuckled confidentially. “What she don’t know won’t hurt her.” He tilted his head and winked at the reporter. “I keep Loreen happy, see? I keep Loreen real happy.”

  Alf shrugged and lit a cigarette. The skeleton of an incompleted speedway—as yet connected to nothing and no more than a scratch on the surface of the land—lay across the site of the old Bank of America building.

  “The Times crew’s over in the Valley,” Gil said. “The News bunch is at the train wreck. We’ll be the only ones on this one. Yep, I don’t think she’ll want her picture in the paper.”

  Alf blew smoke at the windshield. “The Old Man’ll be sore as hell if the other car didn’t shoot the train.”

  Gil ran a light at 8th. “You worry too much.”

  “Julian’s probably out drunk,” Alf said. “They said he hasn’t phoned in for over an hour.”

  “He’s at the wreck, for God’s sake. Don’t worry—it’s his headache.” He took his hands off the wheel long enough to dismiss Julian with a gesture of disgust. “Man, you’re eager. All the time, eager. I could have got that leaper story last night in five minutes. What’d you want to hang around so damned long for?”

  “I had to wait for the medical examiner,” Alf said.

  Gil laughed softly, deep in his throat. “The cop really come boiling back when I lit that firecracker right behind him, didn’t he? You see him?” He patted the wheel and snorted in amusement. “Purple, by God. He was so mad he nearly busted a gut. What the hell could he do? He think he could run in a newspaperman? Huh?” He waited for approval and appreciation.

  “Take it easy, Gil,” Alf said.

  Gil gunned the motor for a second and then eased off the accelerator. “This slow enough for you, Alf?” he said when they had gone another block. “You’re the boss.” The car was going fifteen miles an hour.

  “Yeah,” said Alf wryly.

  Gil, the master, huge, sweaty, solid, snickered to himself. “Maybe this one tonight’s one of them shortsocks kids, huh?”

  “Why don’t you give somebody a break once?” Alf said curtly.

  Gil stared around at the reporter in surprise. “I give ’em a break,” he said. “They don’t want their picture in the paper—” He rubbed his soft, heavy hands caressingly over the steering wheel. “So I ask ’em. ‘Hey, babe,’ I say, ‘what’s your phone number?’ The smart ones get it right off. ‘Call after eight,’ they tell me, ‘when the old man’s at work.’ Just ask anybody on the paper; they’ll tell you how Gil gets it. I get all of it I want. They all take lessons from me, by God.”

  “I know.”

  “And you know what’s the hottest stuff there is? Two-toned blondes. Not bottle blondes, mind you. Real blondes with brown eyes. You ever get any of that two-toned stuff?”

  Alf said nothing.

  “You’re damn right,” Gil said. “They’re all nymphomaniacs. You see a real blonde with brown eyes, and you’ve got a nympho every time.”

  “Yeah, Gil,” Alf said. “Sure.”

  Gil swung the sedan around the corner of Mulvey Street.

  “I forgot,” he said. “Your wife’s a two-tone job, ain’t she?”

  Alf made a soft, small sound deep in his throat. “We can go faster than this.”

  “Slow down. Speed up. What the hell do you want?”

  “Gil,” Alf said, “you know what’s wrong with you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You just don’t like women,” Alf said.

  Gil sniggered softly. “That’s a lot of crap.” And then, more emphatically, “That’s a lot of crap!”

  “You trying to kid people, Gil? You think the guys on the paper didn’t tumble the first time you started yapping about how many scores you make? You ever figure out exactly what it is you’re trying to prove? You think yapping about what a man you are is going to fool anybody?”

  “Shut your goddam mouth!”

  “Or maybe,” Alf said evenly, “maybe you’re just trying to fool yourself.”

  “Shut up!” Gil yelled. He fed gas savagely. “And what the hell do you know about it? What the hell gives you the right to tell me what’s wrong with me? You one of them goddamned psychiatrists or something?”

  Alf let his breath out slowly. “All right,” he said. “Skip it, Gil.”

  “What you so damn smart for? You ain’t able to get anything but home stuff. What the hell you know about it?”

  Alf snubbed his cigarette out in the ash tray and turned to stare out the window. His lips trembled.

  Gil watched the reporter out of the tail of his eye. “I’ll show you, by God. You take this one tonight. From motel row. She’ll holler her number right away. I’ll have my bare feet on her back in a couple of days.” He snorted again and made the moist, kissing sounds.

  “Anybody ever tell you that you’re a louse, Gil?”

  “I told you twice to cut that kind of crap,” Gil said. “Some day I’ll beat your damned face in, Alf. Sure as hell.”

  Alf’s lips drew into a thin, taut line.

  There was an ambulance traffic at 124th Street; a prowler on 9th; a drunk down in a yard on Bonnie Brae. An attempted suicide on Sherbourne.

  “Just don’t get so damned smart,” Gil said. “You want to stay on the good side of me, Alf.”

  He guided the car into the driveway of Mulvey Receiving. He cut the wheel sharply to the right and slammed on the brakes at the last moment, stopping the car with a jolt inches short of the retaining wall of the Press Section.

  The reporter opened the door and waited half in the car and half out for Gil to get his Speed Graphic from the back seat. After the hollow, explosive sound of car doors closing, the two of them walked in silence up the dimly lighted steps of the hospital. In the tile and whitewashed corridor, Gil exchanged laughing insults with two uniformed policemen. They stopped in front of the metal guard doors of the elevator and Gil jabbed the Up button with the meaty ball of his thumb. When there was no response, he said, ‘Stinkin’ city ought to put in a Press elevator.”

  The elevator announced its arrival with the metallic click of uncoupling doors. The young man responsible for its delay wore a white silk scarf as a sling for his right arm. As he stepped into the corridor he moved his left hand apologetically and nodded with a faint, self-effacing smile at the sling.

  “Goddamned fairy,” Gil said loudly as the doors closed behind them. He slammed his thumb at the red button for the third floor. “I can tell fairies a mile away. Ugh. They make me sick.”

  He jostled Alf in order to be the first out of the elevator. He sniffed importantly and hitched his camera more comfortably on his hip. Beside the drinking fountain, a white-clad orderly was finishing a cigarette. The reception hall smelled sharply of sterilization and soap and sickness, and a child was crying monotonously hi one of the curtained rooms.

  “Where’s the dame?”

  Startled, the orderly looked around. He shrugged and nodded toward the emergency room on the left.

  Gil put a plate in the camera and aimed it at the door. “I’ll get it from here when they wheel her out.”

  “How is she?” Alf asked.

  “Couple of pretty bad cuts.”

  The high, flat table in the emergency room was partially concealed by the half-drawn curtain. The woman was l
ying on her side, facing away from the hall. Only the back of her head was visible above the covering sheet. Some of her hair lay in a damp pile on the floor. What had not been shaved hung in straight, blooddrenched, ropy strands that revealed a little of the natural yellow near the unstained ends. She was whimpering softly.

  Smiling faintly, Gil ambled toward the doorway. The intern treating the woman came to the head of the table. When he noticed the photographer, he jerked the curtain closed savagely.

  Gil reddened. “Who the hell he think he is?”

  “Aw, skip it, Gil,” Alf said.

  “By God, I ought to go in there. I’ll take my goddamned pictures while he works if I want to.”

  “Cut it out,” the orderly said. “The doc’s new.”

  Alf looked around the room and then started toward the policeman leaning against the coke machine.

  “It’s time he learns the city runs this place, then,” Gil said indignantly. “Why, God damn, I ought to phone the superintendent. That punk sawbones’ll learn damned quick he can’t push around the press.”

  The crisp, starched nurse at the receptiofi desk looked toward Gil, her face a frown of annoyance.

  When Alf brought out the folded sheets of copy paper, the policeman straightened. “You bring her in?” Alf asked quietly.

  “You the press?”

  “Yeah. The Star.”

  “Oh, the Star. Yeah, me and Mick—that is, Sergeant McCabe.”

  Alf took their names. “When did you get the call?”

  “About one o’clock. Me and Mick.”

  Alf nodded.

  “We found her on the sidewalk. You want the address? It was—I think it was 916 Temple. In the nine hundred block—motel row. There was already a crowd when we got there. From the blood, you’d have thought she was dead.”

  “Uh-huh …?” Alf said, writing. “Well, this guy—she’d been at the Air Flow Motel—this guy she was shacked up with sent her out for a pint. The drug store was closed, there in the nine hundred block, but there’s a liquor store three blocks up. She starts up to the liquor store, and this car—a Ford, she thinks, an old-looking coupe—well, this car pulls up. The driver tries to drag her inside and she starts screaming. He must have had the tire iron in his hand. He hits her with it. He hits her maybe half a dozen times. And then she gets up and starts to run for the motel. She falls down there at the corner—in front of the drug store that was closed. There was already a crowd when we got there.”

  “She didn’t recognize him, is that right?”

  “Just one of them crazy bastards. You know—picks on the first dame he sees.”

  “Well. …” Alf closed the notebook. “Thanks, officer. They have her name at the desk?”

  “I think they got it.”

  “A real looker, huh?” said Gil, as he came up to the policeman.

  The officer shrugged. “She had blood all over her.”

  Gil nudged him. “She’s out cheatin’, huh? Not gettin’ enough at home?”

  “You from the same paper?”

  “Yeah. Gil Bratcher.” Gil wet his lips. “Didn’t get to see what she looked like, huh? One of them anytime, all-the-time babes, I bet?”

  The policeman stared coldly at him, said nothing.

  Gil nudged him again, and chuckling, shook his upper arm. “Maybe her husband’s a fairy, huh?”

  Alf cleared his throat. “Well … ah … Thanks, officer,” he said, and moved quickly away.

  At the reception desk across the room Alf asked the nurse, “Do you have a card yet on the assault case?”

  The nurse began to hunt through the new admission slips on her desk. “You from the press?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gil strolled over. “Where’s Jean, hey, baby?”

  “She’s transferred to Surgery.”

  “You be here from now on?”

  “Probably,” the nurse said.

  Gil made kissing sounds loudly. “We’ll get to know each other real well. I’m with the Star. Gil Bratcher.”

  “That’s nice,” the nurse said. She found the card and passed it to Alf. He put it on the corner of her desk and, bending over, placed his copy paper beside it and prepared to write down the information.

  “What time you get off, baby?” Gil asked.

  Alf straightened up, very slowly, his eyes still on the card. “We don’t want this one, Gil,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Huh?”

  “I think we better …”

  “Hey! What the hell is this? Let me see that card!” He reached out and scooped it up in his soft, meaty hand. “I’m looking for her phone number.”

  Alf glanced toward the room where Gil Bratcher’s wife was being treated for scalp wounds. “I’ll see it’s killed on the city desk,” he said. “No one has to know about it. Just you and me.”

  MISSION

  The time-traveler from the future has been -portrayed as a superciliously amused tourist, as a benevolent and all-powerful deus ex machina temporis, as a cautiously non-intervening scientific observer . . . and in all these guises as one who has things well in hand, to the benefit or confusion of the less fortunate men of the present. Now Kris Neville (who demonstrated so ably, in Underground Movement, that a telepathic mutant may not be a superman) shows a visitor from the future as a hag-ridden man, terribly caught in the trap of his own chronokinetic problem, relentlessly driven by the mission which he must accomplish, psychically and even physically tormented by the very fact of his movement in time. This is something different in time travel stories, compelling unusual empathy with its protagonist and posing a tantalising unresolved question.

  THE 1928 model Ford materialized just off the highway that led to Washington, D.C. It was night. The moon was low. The bright band of stars in the Milky Way swept across the sky; the other stars seemed to be sparks struck off from it as if from flint. The wind gentled to a murmur.

  The driver of the Ford was an old man with dingy, carelessly cared-for white hair. His face was lined, his features sunken. His lips were thin—correct lips, one might think, devoid of emotion. Calculating lips. The face was of a man accustomed to having his own way; to that extent it was childish. Irascible, petulant, impatient. It was the face of a man who dramatized himself to himself; of an egotist.

  He did not know for how long he could survive. Data on the subject was theoretical; a pragmatic demonstration was as impossible as one of the Hereafter. No one had ever come back to talk about it. He almost strangled on his first breath of air.

  It was all he could do to keep from clawing at his collar in desperation. He made himself relax. He was master of his body; it must submit to his will. He would not permit himself to become frightened.

  He took a short breath and held it. Some of the fire went out of his lungs.

  He took a deeper breath. He was oxygen-starved. It was as if he were on a high plateau. His lungs struggled with air that was indefinably different from the air they had breathed only lungfuls ago. He began to breathe more quickly. The breath rasped and rattled in his throat.

  After nearly ten minutes he decided that he was breathing easily enough to attempt to drive.

  He started the motor of the car and wheeled it out onto the highway. He pulled to the outside lane. He drove slowly for fear of being stopped for a traffic violation. Until he could discover the date, he would not know which identification cards to use. A box on the seat beside him contained six different sets designed to cover any date between 1930 and 1950. The car was a model that would not appear improbable as early as 1927. Although the body quivered and rattled and shook uncomfortably, the motor ran smoothly.

  He hoped it was before 1940. If it were later, the probability of accomplishing his mission would be considerably lessened. The date itself would depend on the limit of his compatibility, beyond which limit—that is to say, before which time—he could not be materialized.

  A car flicking past him in the night revealed that he was at least in the Forties. H
e was not one of those people who can tell the year of manufacture at a glance; but he knew that the car had been too sleek and too low slung to have been made earlier.

  He realized that he had forgotten his lights. He hastily pulled them on. The oversight made him faintly ill.

  Ahead of him the sky was colored by the dim night glow of the city not yet asleep. He could picture the Capitol, the Supreme Court Building, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the White House in their correct relationship to each other upon the mathematically precise grid of the streets. The year wouldn’t make too much difference in that respect. He would be able to find his way around.

  Wilson’s house in Georgetown, he thought: a man like that Secretary of State! One tries to explain simple things to him: he flies apart: no self control: one keeps insisting . . .

  His breathing had become less difficult. He was not going to smoke, however. His lungs were sufficiently burdened.

  Before he had gone another mile, he took out a cigarette. He took two quick, nervous puffs before he remembered his previous resolution. He threw the cigarette out the window. (It’s nothing, he thought: the strain; no harm in two puffs.)

  He had not noticed before that his face was feverish. The excitement. How did he feel? There was a sense of urgency and the fear that he might fail. Not that he could fail. Still, the fear was there, in the background. Annoying. Perhaps an old man can’t meet up to the challenge after all.

  Nonsense. I can’t fail, he thought. (Destiny quickens the old, sluggish blood to inevitable success.) A man who gives his life doesn’t fail. There is a peculiar justice to reward martyrdom with success. If the cause is right.

  He passed an all-night restaurant. Through the window he could see a magazine rack. He pulled over to the side of the road. He wanted a cup of coffee or a drink of something stronger. Bad for the heart.

  An old man, he thought, can permit himself a cigarette. He lit one. He puffed once and threw it away. Damned weakness, he thought; shouldn’t tolerate it. Bend the body, bend the will. Concentrate.

  After the reaction passed, he got out and walked back to the restaurant. He bought a Washington Post. He folded the paper and tucked it under his arm.