by William Tenn
"You see, I don't usually—" he began as he threw the ball and caught it, threw the ball and caught it.
"Very busy right now, but some other ti—" he continued as he caught the ball and threw it, caught the ball and threw it.
No matter in which direction he threw the ball, no matter how many eager pairs of child hands made a grab for it, it was always Dorothy who received it and threw it back to him.
"Yay, Dorothy!" the children yelled. "This is fun!"
"Be glad to play with you kids as soon as I finish my—" Carter panted, finding it fantastically tough exercise.
"Yay, Dorothy! This is a real good game!"
"Such a nice man!"
"So much fun!"
Dorothy threw the ball straight up in the air and it disappeared. "Let's play leapfrog," she said. "Would you like to play leapfrog with us, mister?"
"Sorry," Carter gasped as he bent, his hands on his knees, so that she could leap over his back from behind. "I haven't played leapfrog in years and I don't intend to st—" He ran forward, placed his hands in the small of Dorothy's back, sailed across, bent forward again in expectation of her jump. "Leapfrog is one game that I never—"
They played leapfrog until he was wobbling with dizziness, until every breath felt as if it had been clawed out of his chest.
Dorothy seated herself gracefully on the ground and gathered the children in an adoring cluster. "Now we'd like to hear a story. Please, mister, tell us a story?"
Carter started an agonized protest. It was somehow transformed into the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, told wheezingly and punctuated with heaving gulps for air. Then he told the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Then he told the story of Bluebeard.
Somewhere near the end of that particular work, Dorothy disappeared. But the children remained, and Carter continued the story, willy-nilly. The kids began to look frightened. Some shivered, others moaned and cried.
It had been getting darker for the past few minutes, and just as Carter finished the last lines of Bluebeard and, without stopping, launched into "Once upon a time there was a poor but honest woodcutter who had two children named Hansel and Gretel," a huge black cloud slid across the sky and swooped down at them.
A terrifying scarlet face with an enormous nose and flashing white teeth came out of the cloud and roared till the ground shook. Then it stopped and began to gnash its teeth. This sounded like an explosion in a crockery warehouse.
The children screamed in pure eye-popping terror and ran. "Dorothy!" they shrieked. "Dorothy, save us! The Bad Old Man! Save us, Dorothy, save us! Dorothy, where are you?"
Carter sank to the grass, released and utterly exhausted. He was far too tired to run or even look up, far too upset to care what happened to him any more. It seemed like the first time in hours that his body was his again to command; but his body wasn't worth very much at the moment.
"Hey, Mac," a voice queried sympathetically over his head. "They givin' you a hard time?"
It was the scarlet face from the cloud. It no longer looked terrifying, merely concerned in a friendly fashion. And it was shrinking rapidly in size until it was in correct proportion to the normal human body under it. When it was a rather ordinary red and grizzled face, dirty with a few days' growth of beard around the red and busily veined nose, its owner knelt on the edge of the cloud and leaped to the ground, a distance, by this time, of half a dozen feet.
He was an oldish man of middle height, wearing a pair of solid gray pants, a torn brown shirt which hung outside it down to his hips and, on his bare feet, two frayed and filthy canvas shoes, one of which was split at the sole. He looked familiar, as every bum somehow looks like every other bum. He was archetypically the shambling, sodden derelict, a pure example of absolute human junk, but—
He was an adult.
Carter sprang up and offered his hand joyfully. It was shaken in a flabby, uncertain, half-cringing way, like a newly paroled prisoner taking his farewell of the warden.
"Could you use a drink, Mac?"
"I sure as hell could," Carter told him heartily. "Am I glad to see you!"
The derelict nodded vaguely, reached up and pulled the black cloud even closer. He fumbled inside and pulled a bottle out. It was about half full, but though the fluid it contained was the proper shade of amber, it was clear glass all the way around. No label.
He held out this beggar's choice. "Name's Eddie. What they call me Shirttail. You need a glass to drink from? Ain't no glasses."
Carter shrugged. He sterilized the open top of the bottle with the palm of his hand, put it to his mouth and took a broad gulp.
"Whouch!" he said.
He found himself coughing so hard that he almost dropped the bottle. Shirttail took it away from him solicitously. "Awful, ain't it?" he asked, then proceeded to belt down a third of the stuff.
Awful, Carter decided, was not quite the word for it. It tasted like whiskey, all right, somewhere way down at the bottom, but with an overlay consisting of iodine, ammonia, camphor and dilute hydrochloric acid. His tongue squirmed in his mouth like a trapped snake.
Shirttail removed the bottle from his mouth, shuddered, grimaced, and licked his lips. "That's what she thinks whiskey tastes like."
"Who? Dorothy?"
"Atsit. The kid—whatever she thinks something tastes like, that's what it tastes like. But it's better'n nothing, better'n no booze at all. Wanna come up to the place? We can sit a while."
He was pointing to the cloud which hung low over them, a dark and misshapen dirigible. Doubtfully, Carter grabbed some of its tenuous material and pulled himself up. It was like swimming through fog that felt solid only at the places your hands touched it.
A soaring black cavern of a room. Off in a corner—a niche, rather, since there were no corners—stood an army cot covered with ragged plaid blankets, a tableful of cracked cups and saucers and three sagging, garbagey-looking easy chairs. An unshaded lightbulb hung from a thin wire over the cot and burned tinily, resentfully, in the piles of gloom. Whether or not the area behind the cot could properly be called a wall, it was covered from top to bottom with glossy pictures of naked women.
"Not my idea—hers," Shirttail explained as he clambered up through the floor. "Everything's hers, every idea, everything. What she once saw the inside of a night-watchman's shack, I figure. What to her I'm the same kinda guy as the night-watchman, so that's the layout I get. But thank God for the bottle. The pictures, far as I'm concerned, you can have, but the bottle—thank God for the bottle."
He offered it to Carter, who shook his head and hand in a no. They sat in two facing easy chairs, each of which immediately settled off to one side in opposite directions. Damn it, Carter thought, I have seen him before. But where?
"Take a slug, Mac, go ahead, take a slug. One good thing she's got here, that kid—the bottle gets full as fast as you kill it. You ain't takin' nothin' from me when you help yourself. And if you don't drink regular, you'll be talkin' to yourself. What you won't talk sense."
Carter considered the point and saw it might well be valid. He took another drink. It was fully as bad as the first, but the effects of the alcohol came through more strongly now and tended to insulate against the flavor. He sighed and swallowed some more. No doubt about it, the world—even Dorothy's world—looked better.
He handed the bottle back and studied his companion. Hardly the right type for this place, when you came right down to it. A bum. A very average old bum. Why him as The Bad Old Man?
"How long have you been here?" Carter asked him.
Shirttail shrugged and stared loose-lipped over the top of the bottle. "A year, maybe. Two years, maybe. What there's no way to figure. Sometimes winter one day, sometimes summer tomorrow. What even my beard don't grow no more after I came. I feel like years and years and years and years. Worsen stir, worsen anything. The things I been through here, Mac, the things I been through!"
"Bad?" Carter asked sympathetically.
"Bad?" Shirtta
il indicated just how bad by rolling his red eyes in an emphatic upward arc. "Bad don't come near. I got to go out and scare those kids whenever she wants me to. What I'm in the sack, what I got other things on my mind, don't make no difference. Dorothy gives out with a think: 'Come a-runnin' and start a-scarin'.' I got to drop whatever I'm doin'. I'm in the sack, what the hell, I got other things on my mind, I got to drop it and start a-scarin'. I blow up big like you just saw me, I got to scream and bang my choppers, I got to zoom on down. Then the kids yell: 'Dorothy, save us!' and she starts takin' me apart. What I mean apart. The things she's done to me, biff! bam! pow! pam!, slapped me silly, up, down, around, every which way, for a-scarin' those kids! What it wasn't my idea in the first place. I just do it 'cause she gives out with a think and makes me do it."
"Ever try resisting, refusing?" Carter inquired. "I mean what happens if you say no?"
"Mac, you don't say no. You just don't. Everything here goes her way. When she itches, you scratch. When she sneezes, you wipe your nose. What I used to call her all kindsa names to myself, just to pass the time—Mac, I don't remember a single one now. I try to remember one dirty name and I can't, to save my skin. She's just Dorothy. That's all I can call her. You know what I mean? Everything goes her way, even inside your head. The only leeway you get is to stay the kinda guy she sees you as in the first place. But otherwise it's her way, and the longer you stick around, the more her way it is."
Carter remembered with dismay how little he had wanted to play ball or leapfrog and how thoroughly he had played. Worse, how he had told stories when he had intended to protest. And worse yet, he hadn't—even in his own mind—used the phrase The Malted Milk Monster for some time now! He had thought of her, had referred to her, only as Dorothy.
"And the longer you stick around—"
He had to get out of here, had to find some way to smash out of this world—fast.
Shirttail was offering the bottle again. Carter refused it impatiently. Escape, breaking out, that came first. And for that he'd need his mind at its clearest. The alternative was being slowly absorbed, psychologically as well as physically, into Dorothy's dream world, until even his thoughts would be only slightly eccentric versions of her image of him, and he would be caught, like a fly immortalized by amber, in whatever habitation and whatever role she visualized for The Nice Man.
The Nice Man! He shivered. What a way to spend the rest of his life! No, now, while he was still more or less himself, Carter Broun, while his brain still glittered with the edge of a bright young motivational research executive in the real world, now was the time to break through.
The real world. As good a name for it as any other. Carter was a mystic never and a Freudian only when the occasion suited him. His credo was simple: anything that is is real. So...
Postulate a cosmos sufficiently long in extension and sufficiently broad in possibility, and there has to be room somewhere in all its infinities for every kind of world that Man could imagine.
Or a child dream up.
And suppose a child, out of overpowering longing and loneliness, out of some incredible innate talent, perhaps, is able to break through the folds of cosmic enormities into the one cranny where its dream world exists as a tangible, everyday truth. Not much of a step from there to switching other individuals, adults even, stones and flowerpots certainly, from one universe to the other. The original supposition, Carter decided, was the difficult one. Once that was accepted, the others were easy.
In an unlimited number of parallel worlds, to find the true home of one's mind...
Was that what Dorothy had done? And, in that case, which would be the dream world, which the real? You could probably die in either with equal ease—so that was no criterion.
Well, what difference did it make? The real world, for Carter, was the world from which he had been pulled, the world in which he had standing, individuality and personal purpose. The world he liked and intended to return to. And this, this other world, no matter how substantial unto itself in its peculiar space-time matrix, was the dream world—the world he must flee. The world that he had to prove, against the logic of his very senses, did not exist—by leaving it, or by destroying it somehow.
Destroying...
He stared hard at Shirttail. No wonder the derelict had looked so familiar!
It had been the briefest glimpse, weeks ago, possibly months, but the word brought back the sententious caption under that unforgettable photograph.
A tabloid newspaper on a print-wet, newly arrived pile he'd noticed over his shoulder as he'd been passing the newsstand at 53rd Street, just off Madison. And he'd had to stop and take another look at the photograph spreading its shock value over a sector of the front page. A MAN WHO DESTROYED HIMSELF was the caption's headline.
The caption went on to explain, in the most appalled journalese, that this was what you might expect to look like if you spent the rest of your life not working, sleeping in doorways, and drinking, instead of eating, your meals. "Even hardened interns and nurses at the hospital averted their faces from this terrible thing that had once been a man."
But the photograph did show a terrible thing that had once been a man. He was shown in the alley as he'd been found, shown just as the stretcher was being lifted, and you weren't likely to forget him for a long, long time.
The worst part of it was that he was alive. The eyes stared into the lens of the camera without any pretense of seeing. There was no mark on the face or body, no blood, nothing but dirt, and yet you had the feeling that this was a man who had fallen out of a window ten stories up or been hit by a car speeding at ninety miles an hour—and not been killed. Not completely killed, anyway, just partially killed.
The body lay and the eyes stared and the man was alive, but nothing more than that could be said. Looking at the picture, you suddenly thought of complex organic compounds that were almost living creatures but had not yet made the grade. The flabby, sheer nonconsciousness of this yet-sentient creature made catatonia seem in comparison a rather jolly, extremely active state.
According to the caption, he had been found looking like this in an alley; he had been removed to a large city hospital, and, after ten hours, the doctors had not been able to do a single thing with him. No response at all.
Carter remembered the picture well. It had been a picture of Shirttail.
Somewhere, at this very moment, possibly in a hospital in Grenville Acres, before the eyes of a terrified, a nauseated Lee, there was another body that bore a physical resemblance to one Carter Broun, but that in every important respect looked exactly like that horrible photograph. A body that was barely alive, that would not respond to any stimuli, that could do no more than exist—since its consciousness was elsewhere.
Here, in Dorothy's private chocolate-candy world.
He had to get out of this place. No matter what, he was going to get out of this place.
Only he'd need something close to dynamite. Psychological dynamite.
"—even cut my throat," Shirttail was going on heavily. "Oh, I maybe coulda cut my throat at the beginning, if I'da thoughta it. Too late now: I'm stopped cold any time I try. What I tried starving myself, but no go. Only candy to eat inna first place. Anybody can kick candy—it don't do no good, though. You don't hafta eat here, don't even hafta breathe. You stop breathin', you don't croak. Fact, Mac, fact. I done it. Hours and hours you can hold your breath: nothin' happens. Nothin' happens but what she wants to happen. And that's all. That's it."
Carter suggested, desperately trying to drag an elementary idea out of the concept of parallel universes, "How about the two of us getting together here and talking things over, just as we're doing? If we mapped out some workable sort of plan right now, it would be something she wouldn't like to have happen—but if we did, it would be real—it would have happened."
"Mac, you still don't get it. If you and me are together talkin', then some way or other that's the way she wants it. What she figures we go together, lik
e, and we oughta be talkin' or bein' together. Meanwhile, she's workin' it out. What she's gonna do next. What we ain't gonna like it one damn bit, but so what?—far's she's concerned."
Carter frowned, not at Shirttail's last remarks, but at an unexpected and highly uncomfortable corroboration. He had suddenly felt an enormous tugging sensation in both his mind and body. Something was pulling at him to leave the cloud and descend to the candied surface.
Dorothy was coming back. She wanted him on the spot once more. She had a new sequence. Carter fought the tug grimly. He began to perspire.
The tug grew stronger. And stronger.
He squeezed his hands into tight, painful fists. "The Malted Milk Monster," he forced himself to say between clenched teeth. "Remember—The Malted Milk Monster."
Shirttail looked up, intrigued. "Hey," he said. "Do me a favor, Mac—cuss her out. It'll do me good, honest, to hear a coupla good, first-class cuss words. Even if I won't remember them worth a damn, I'd still like to hear them again, just for old time's sake. Hey, Mac?"
Carter, threshing about in the chair, elbows digging into his sides, immersed in his own private struggle, shook his head. "No," he gasped. "Can't. Not now."
"I know. It's tough. What I mean, tough. Like when I first come, I used to battle it out the same way, every time I feel her give out with a think. I battle and I battle, and it's no go. I been moochin' all day, see, up and down the East Fifties, Sutton Place, all like that. I been moochin' for the price of a flop, for the price of a shot, but not a chance. What it's so cold, my back's draggin' the sidewalk, but the whole goddam world's got its pocket buttoned. Comes night, no flop. The whole night, I carry the banner. I stay awake, I keep walkin', what I don't wanna freeze. Five, six o'clock in the mornin', there's this can, there's half a fifth right on top in a bagfulla garbage. I hit it, oh, I hit it good."
Against his most determined mental opposition, Carter found himself getting to his feet. He knew his face was turning purple with the effort. He had to stop her now. He had to. It was the only way to invalidate her world.