Collected Fiction (1940-1963)

by William P. McGivern

  “Everything comes out in the wash—it always does!”

  THE VISIBLE INVISIBLE MAN

  First published in the December 1940 issue of Amazing Stories.

  Hopefully Oscar poured his secret ingredient into the vat and—wham!—he had his vanishing cream. But he didn’t want the real thing!

  CHAPTER I

  OSCAR DOOLITTLE cleared his throat with a nervous, tittering cough as he stepped up to the cosmetic counter of Natz’s Nifty Drug Store.

  “I want fifty pounds of vanishing cream,” he said to the professionally pleasant-looking young man, who regarded him from behind the gleaming array of bottles. “I hope you’ve got that much,” he added anxiously, “because it’s very important that I have it today.”

  “Fifty pounds?” the clerk repeated incredulously. “Why, that—”

  He broke off suddenly and peered closely at Oscar. He saw a wispy, slight individual, dressed in a limp brown suit that hung tiredly over bony shoulders. And large brown eyes gleaming with hopeful excitement.

  The young clerk’s puzzled stare gradually changed to one of sympathetic understanding.

  “Now, now,” he said soothingly, “you just wait right here and I’ll go and see about your—er—fifty pounds of vanishing cream. I’ll be back in a jiffy and maybe you’d better fan yourself with your hat while I’m gone. It might help a little.”

  “Thank you,” Oscar said, moved by this friendly solicitude. “Thanks a lot, but I’m really quite comfortable.”

  The clerk backed away from Oscar, smiling gently.

  “Don’t go away,” he said coaxingly, turned and scurried off down the aisle.

  At the end of the aisle he jerked open a door and stumbled breathlessly into a small office where a fat, red-faced man sat smoking a thin cigar.

  “Quick, Mr. Natz,” he hissed. “Call the police! There’s a madman outside. He says he wants to buy fifty pounds of vanishing cream. He may be dangerous.”

  Mr. Natz digested this information in silence and then squinted upward through the wreaths of smoke at his trembling employee.

  “Fifty pounds,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Did he offer to pay for it?”

  “Why, gosh,” his clerk stuttered, “I didn’t think to ask him.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Natz gloomily, “if he offers to pay for it, he probably is crazy. But if we don’t take his money, we’re crazy. I’ll go out and talk to him.”

  With this he hoisted himself from his chair and waddled out of the office, followed by his fluttering clerk.

  Mr. Natz approached Oscar from the side, like a man closing in on a skittish horse. Enboldened by Oscar’s harmless appearance he stepped closer and asked:

  “Are you the gentleman who wanted the vanishing cream?”

  Oscar turned at the sound of the voice, blinking rapidly.

  “Yes. Yes, indeed,” he said, “I want fifty pounds of it.” He looked from Mr. Natz to the bulging-eyed clerk anxiously. “Why,” he said weakly, “is there something wrong about that?”

  “Not if you’ve got the money to pay for it,” Natz said hopefully.

  “Oh, is that all?” Oscar’s sigh was relieved. “Certainly I have the money. I’ve been saving it for weeks.”

  Natz shrugged resignedly. “Okay,” he said. “You got the money, we got the cream.”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” Oscar beamed. “Will you wrap it up for me right away? You see, I have to take it home before I go to work and I don’t want to be late. I haven’t been late in eleven years,” he finished proudly.

  “All right, buddy,” Natz said. “Far be it from us to interfere with a record like that. Willie,” he barked at the clerk, “get a hamper from the basement and bring up the freight scales.” Willie nodded vaguely. With a final unconvinced look at Oscar, he hurried off. Within several minutes he was back, pushing a cumbersome scale on rollers and dragging behind him a spacious wicker basket.

  He shoved the scale toward the cosmetic counter and placed the basket on its flat, wide weighing plate. Then, with the assistance of Mr. Natz, he began piling the heavy jars of white vanishing cream into the basket. Jar after jar was loaded into the basket, and Oscar hummed happily as it creaked protestingly under their weight.

  “That just about does it,” Mr. Natz said finally. He got down on his knees and peered at the indicator. “Yep, fifty pounds, six ounces. We’ll throw in the ounces for good measure.”

  “Gosh, thanks!” Oscar said gratefully. His large brown eyes beamed delightedly as Mr. Natz got out a pad of scratch paper and a stubby pencil and began figuring up the cost of the vanishing cream.

  IT was a sizable amount but Oscar counted out the money cheerfully.

  “Now, how are you goin’ to get it home?” Natz asked.

  “Well, I don’t live far,” Oscar answered, “and if you’ll help me get it on my shoulder I think I can manage.”

  “Anything you say, friend,” Natz said. Stooping, he grasped a handle of the basket and with Willie’s help, he hoisted it into the air.

  “All right,” he panted, “get under it.”

  Oscar took a deep breath and placed a narrow shoulder under the edge of the basket. He reached up and grasped the rim with determined fingers.

  “Let go,” he cried, “I’ve got it!”

  Oscar and Willie released their grip, and the weight of the basket dug suddenly and painfully into Oscar’s inadequately padded shoulders.

  His knees buckled, but with a supreme effort he managed to right himself and totter toward the revolving door, the basket swaying precariously with every step.

  He squeezed into the revolving door and, with a contortion that defied all existing laws of gravity and balance, he wriggled through the spinning portal and staggered onto the sidewalk.

  Natz mopped his perspiring brow as Oscar disappeared around the corner of the building.

  “It takes all kinds,” he muttered. “It takes all kinds to make a world.”

  BUT in spite of laboring breath and the increasing weight of the bulky basket, Oscar Doolittle stumbled along, his soul singing with elation. He was blissfully unmindful of the curious and mirthful stares of the pedestrians he encountered.

  “Let ’em laugh,” he told himself optimistically. “When I introduce my new, revolutionary face cream they won’t laugh—no, sir!”

  Even now he could envision with ecstatic anticipation the huge headlines that would blazon his discovery to a grateful world.

  DOOLITTLE DISCOVERS

  DANDY DREAM CREAM!

  It was going to be wonderful. And when the money began to pour in, he and Ann could get married right away. That was the most wonderful thing of all.

  When Oscar finally staggered into his small bedroom, he was dizzy with exhaustion. He set his burden down on the floor and sank into a chair. But not for long. There was work to be done.

  He stood up and crossed over to a strange, complicated contraption that took up almost half the space in the room.

  It was a box-like affair, sprinkled with rheostats and dials and wires leading from it to a storage battery in the corner of the room. The top of the box was grilled like an electric stove and on top of this, there stood a huge glass hopper, in which a strange dark-colored liquid bubbled noisily. Vapors and gases rose from the vial, clouding the room with a murky haze.

  Oscar peered at the dials and inspected the bubbling liquid.

  “ ’Bout ready,” he muttered. “No time to lose.”

  Turning from the odd equipment, he picked up a jar of the vanishing cream and unscrewed the metal cap. Then with feverish haste he seized a knife and began digging the pasty cream from the jar, allowing the lumpy wads to fall splashing into the boiling liquid.

  In fifteen minutes the room was littered with empty jars, and the sticky compound in the hopper had risen to a bubbling white mess that threatened to overflow onto the floor.

  “Maybe I got too much,” Oscar thought. But no, he was down to the last bottle of cream and there was s
till an inch of room left in the vat.

  “Good thing,” Oscar mumbled. “I’ve still got to put my special formula in.”

  WITH trembling fingers he picked up a black bottle from a work bench next to the box-like mechanism. It was filled with an oily black fluid, and as Oscar removed the cork his heart hammered with pride. It was his own formula and it was wonderful. Or, he amended, it would be wonderful.

  The gluey compound was frothing and seething as he tilted the black bottle and prepared to dump its contents into the vat. He knew suddenly how Franklin must have felt when he discovered electricity: a giddy sense of exhilaration and a throbbing pulse that sent the blood racing through his veins.

  It was great, and with a smile on his lips Oscar closed his eyes and emptied his special formula into the bubbling cauldron.

  The results were a thousand times more surprising than Oscar, in his nimblest flight of imagination, could have conceived.

  A geyser of flame shot upward from the vat and the next instant, the floor trembled with the force of a mighty explosion. Oscar was hurled to the floor and before he could move again, a sticky suffocating blanket seemed to descend upon him.

  Thrashing wildly, he beat at the cloying folds that draped about him and finally managed to struggle to his feet. He forced his eyes open, and a despairing moan broke from his lips at the sight that met his stricken gaze.

  His machine was utterly demolished. Parts of it were strewn from one end of the room to the other, and Oscar himself was covered from head to foot with the sticky paste that had bubbled in the bowels of the vat.

  “Oh,” he groaned, “something must have gone wrong.”

  And a moment later—“What are you up to in there, Oscar Doolittle?”

  The shrill voice sounded from the hallway. Oscar trembled in panic and guilt as he recognized it. His landlady!

  “It’s nothing, Mrs. Spears,” he quavered in terror. “I just blew a fuse. A big fuse.”

  “Fuse, nothing,” Mrs. Spears screamed, “I’m coming in there!”

  The words were slightly unnecessary, for by the time they had stopped echoing Mrs. Spears was standing in the middle of the room.

  “Oh,” she shrieked as her horrified gaze encountered Oscar’s bespattered figure, “what have you been up to?”

  “It was my invention—” Oscar began.

  But Mrs. Spears’ howl of anguish cut him off.

  “Inventing again! This is the last straw. I’ve warned you before but this time I’m through. Out you go! Pack your duds and clear out of here.”

  She paused to stare wildly about the wreckage of the room.

  “And remember,” she snapped, “you don’t get your trunk until this mess has been paid for.”

  With a final withering look at Oscar’s paste-daubed figure, she marched stiffly from the room, banging the door behind her.

  The slam of the door seemed to Oscar to symbolize somehow the crash of his own hopes and dreams. He slumped into a chair and stared moodily at the strewn remains of his machine. From his sorrowful eyes two large tears welled, trickled down the pasty substance that caked his cheeks, to fall with a tiny splash to the floor.

  Finally he stood up wearily. Disappointments or no, he couldn’t be late for work.

  CHAPTER II

  Oscar’s Bad Day

  FORTY-FIVE minutes later, disillusioned and disconsolate, Oscar Doolittle trudged through the portals of the Midland State Bank. Even the sight of Ann, hurrying to meet him, did not revive his spirits.

  “I’ve got some bad news for you,” he said, when she stood in front of him. “My invention is a flop. I guess what everybody has been saying about me is true. I’m a failure, a washout.”

  If Oscar was expecting sympathy and encouragement he received a rude shock. Although he might have been prepared for it, because of late Ann had been acting anything but the role of a starry-eyed bride-to-be.

  Ann Meade was a cuddly, shapely blonde, but the words that snapped from her now seemed very much out of place with her sugary appearance.

  “If that’s what people are saying,” she blazed, “they’re absolutely right!” You’re nothing but a spineless, weak-kneed jellyfish, Oscar Doolittle! A timid, helpless doormat that other men wipe their feet on. I must have been out of my mind when I accepted your ring, but thank goodness I’m sane now! Here!”

  Oscar Doolittle listened dazedly to this unflattering summary of his negative virtues, and then his incredulous eyes focused on the modest diamond ring that was thrust under his nose.

  “But darling,” he bleated hoarsely, “you can’t do this to me! We’ve been engaged for five years, we’ve worked together here at the bank. What will Mother say?”

  Ann Meade’s neat little mouth looked like a steam-rollered rosebud.

  “To be blunt about it,” she said icily, “I don’t give a darn what your mother says. Let’s call our engagement a case of mistaken identity. I thought you were a man—and what a mistake that turned out to be! If you were a man—a man like that handsome Lester Mercer, now—you’d realize that no woman can love a man she doesn’t respect.”

  WITH this withering blast as an exit line, Ann dropped the ring into Oscar’s trembling fingers and marched away, her heels clattering angrily on the marble floor.

  Oscar stared after her trim, rounded figure as it swished through the long corridor of the Midland State Bank and finally disappeared with a flash of silken legs around the corner of the incoming-cash department.

  As the realization of his loss flooded over him, a lump the size of an ostrich egg crawled up his scrawny neck, almost choking him. It was with an effort that he managed to get himself under control. He blinked rapidly and squared his thin shoulders resolutely.

  “I’ll show her,” he said. “I’ll show her, and then she’ll be sorry. “I’ll—”

  “What’s that you’re mumbling?”

  The words cracked like a pistol shot next to Oscar’s ear, dissolving his incipient daydream, jerking him about to face the horrible reality of Lester Mercer, chief efficiency expert of the Midland State Bank and chief fly in Oscar’s ointment.

  In spite of his panicky terror, Oscar experienced a jealous twinge as he goggled at the ruddy features and healthy bulk of Lester Mercer.

  This was the man responsible for Ann’s angry words. Ann had become completely captivated by Mercer’s dominating bluster, his executive belligerence. Ann thought he was wonderful.

  Lester Mercer, it may be said, quite agreed with her.

  On top of that Mercer had been taking Ann to dinner for the past month, filling her head with the idea that she was wasting herself on an insignificant little twerp like Oscar Doolittle.

  It was a situation to prompt an ordinary person to swift, drastic action. But Oscar Doolittle was far from being an ordinary person.

  “I’m sorry,” he stuttered breathlessly. “I was just clearing my throat. No offense, I trust. I’ll be getting on to work.” He started away but Mercer’s voice jerked him around again.

  “Not so fast, Doolittle,” Mercer snapped. “I can’t say that I’m satisfied with the way you’ve been handling your work. It may be necessary to make some changes, relieve you of some of your responsibility. I’ll see you about it later.”

  He flicked a glance at his expensive wrist-watch.

  “I have to discuss a few details with Miss Meade at the present. I’ll see you later.”

  He turned and strode away, head out-thrust, in the best executive tradition.

  Oscar turned sadly and tottered toward his little cubicle, his mind reeling under the double-barreled kick in the pants he had received. His invention a flop. His girl gone—the work he had done for twelve years snatched away from him. It was too much.

  There was a strange buzzing in Oscar’s ears and his head floated with a peculiar lightness, as he reeled past the long, barred row of tellers’ windows. His whole world had gone smash, turned topsy-turvy. Nothing, he was sure, could ever shock him again.
r />   In that he was tragically mistaken.

  For as the strange buzzing noise hummed louder in his ears, things were beginning to happen, that promised to make the preceding events as commonplace and prosaic as the rest of Oscar Doolittle’s entire existence.

  Unaware of this, Oscar slouched dolefully along, until he reached the full-length mirror that glittered magnificently from one of the imposing columns that supported the dome-like ceiling of the Midland State Bank.

  IT was Oscar’s custom to pause here, adjust his tie and comb his hair, before he entered his tiny office for the day. And in spite of his benumbed, dazed condition, the habit of fourteen years was too strong to be resisted. Automatically, he moved closer, fumbling for his comb.

  He was prepared to see reflected in the mirror his small, squinting, sandy-haired person, staring back at him. To his amazement, he saw nothing of the sort!

  Instead, the mirror reflected the wide lobby of the bank, bustling clients and employees and the revolving doors that were spinning continually as people surged in and out of the building.

  The mirror reflected everything in front of it, everything but Oscar Doolittle.

  Stunned, Oscar crowded closer to the mirror, until he was a scant six inches from its gleaming surface.

  Still he was not reflected. Reason tottered.

  “What’s happened?” Oscar cried frantically. “What’s the matter?”

  With trembling fingers he felt the surface of the smooth glass. He could see the moist impression where his hands touched the glass, feel its cool, smooth surface under his fingers.

  Suddenly, with terrifying swiftness, he realized that at the spot where his hands touched the mirror, there was nothing. Nothing at all. No hands. No reflection.

  He jerked his hands in front of his incredulous eyes, pressed them frantically into his face. His mind wavered giddily on the brink of insanity. For while he could feel his hands on his face, he couldn’t see them.