Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  “We always bake them whole where I come from,” Galindo explained. “They burst and the seeds fall out. With grated cheese and salsa picante—” He raised eyebrows and kissed his fingertips.

  I knew the rest of the meal would be good anyhow. We had progressed by this time to the hammermill where Sr. Galindo compounded a mash of seeds ranging from rye to kaffir com, with exact amounts of oyster shell, bone meal, fish meal, and vitamins. Some of the latter came from Germany by routes more devious than a shipment of heroin but their presence spelled the difference between profit and loss for Sr. Galindo’s grain-to-meat conversion.

  I wondered what the small boy had wanted.

  Galindo showed some embarrassment. “You know how hard it 4s to get anything fixed in this country. The TV’s been acting up.” He looked at me hopefully. I promised to do what I could—which, without tools, would probably be very little.

  We were admiring a microtome and staining apparatus which augmented the microscope I had donated some years ago. Galindo was explaining to my mad friend the auguries performed over sliced liver in his constant war against the diseases which could wipe him out overnight.

  My stomach had finally reached the conclusion that my throat was cut when the small boy who had taken the calabaza returned with the news that dinner and the ladies awaited.

  But as usual, dinner and the ladies needed several finishing touches so I glanced into the front room where the Galindo brood was acquiring its English in painless, Lone Ranger-sized doses, and immediately knew I was off the hook.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your TV,” I told Galindo. “See how the picture tears and the sound razzes in perfect unison? Something around here’s setting up interference.”

  “The refrigeration—” Galindo began hopefully.

  I shook my head. There were no neon signs within 10 km. I wondered what could be causing the pulsation. But dinner was finally served so I forgot about it.

  Dinner was indeed delicious—young fryers barbecued and drenched in a sauce not so fiery as might be expected from Senora de Galindo’s native state of Tabasco. Galindo ate much bread and salad. He ignored the chicken with an intensity which brought to mind the bitter days when he must have eaten little else. The meal was nearly over when he suddenly remembered and asked, “iy la calabaza?”

  Galindo’s wife shrugged. “Like a rock,” she said.

  “¿After two hours in the oven? ¡How strange!”

  Galindo was buttering a final birote, that Mexican creation which looks like a roll and tastes like bread used to taste, when it happened: There was a muffled explosion, more felt than heard, and the oven door flew open.

  “¡La calabaza!” my wife shrieked, “We forgot to turn off the oven!”

  “Those seeds and pulp will stick like glue,” Mrs. Galindo moaned. She turned off the oven and we settled down for a final round of coffee, still twittering slightly, like poultry after a fox has been flushed from the henhouse.

  The gentlemen retired to another room and discussed the role of the Church in Mexican history. This was interesting for Sr. Galindo was a Mason, while my mad friend was an apologist of such brilliance that I suspected he might someday follow die path of Giordano Bruno. They were nearing the gauntlet and card exchanging stage when we were interrupted from the kitchen.

  “What kind of calabaza was that?” Galindo’s wife asked. We followed her to the now cool oven.

  There were spatters of melted plastic, shattered bits of ceramic, and some extremely miniaturized devices at whose function I could only guess. Intermixed with the whole were rent sections of die covering which had resembled some sort of calabaza. I began to wish I’d seen it after the frost melted away.

  “¡Aja!” Galindo said with something of a twinkle, “You Americans and your fantastic new weapons.”

  I started to protest but I knew Sr. Galindo’s faith in the American Way would permit no other explanation.

  One of the older children came from the front room. “La televisión funciona perfectamente,” he reported.

  I had a sudden suspicion that I knew the exact moment when it had started functioning perfectly. “Do you mind if I take two or three of those little things that look like they’re not broken?” I asked.

  “It’s yours.” Galindo smiled. He didn’t have to clean the oven.

  Wishing they were mine, I slipped two of the small things Into my pocket.

  Late that night as we retraced our path over Carretera Federal Número 2 to the border, our wives again discussed the botch look, and what effect it would have on eye makeup.

  “I can see where Galindo owes something of a debt to the U.S.,” my mad friend said.

  “Not half what the world owes him,” I muttered.

  “How come?”

  “You know how in those science-fiction yams you hate so much, some mad scientist always saves the world from destruction?”

  My friend made an interrogatory noise.

  “Sr. Galindo just did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Saved us from invasion.”

  “You write so much of that jazz you’re beginning to believe it.”

  I remembered the unhappy condition of Sr. Galindo’s fryers. “Wasn’t it established several years ago that UHF radiation seems to foul up the compass arrangements in homing pigeons?” I asked.

  “Not in the kind of stuff I read,” my mad friend said.

  “I don’t know much about telemetering,” I said, “But I’ve seen enough around the Saucer Works to know this isn’t ours.” I handed him something scraped from Galindo’s oven. “It isn’t Russian either.”

  “So?”

  “Funny about you mentioning that tide-pool evolution bit today,” I said. “I wonder,” I wondered, “Just how often a binary system like Earth and Moon occurs? It might pose all sorts of conjectures about climatic conditions for anyone unfamiliar with such a system.”

  “What are you running on about?” my mad friend inquired. Green eyes flared suddenly on the roadway and he braked just in time to miss a cow.

  “Let me put it this way: If you dumped a weather station on an unknown planet and got a normal reading for several days, then a sudden drop to 60° below for six months, then in a matter of minutes the temperature climbed into a range that melted your transmitter, wouldn’t you decide that planet wasn’t worth invading?”

  My mad friend placed a stiff forefinger to one nostril and inhaled noisily through the other. But he was very quiet all the way home.

  Ringer

  Security had not liked it, but Dr. Mason had insisted on a boat. What, after all, could happen to him on a calm and empty sea?

  AFTER SUCH A PROMISING BEGINNING, Dr. Mason’s perfect day was ruined. There was no ignoring the object in front of him. He supposed it served him right, after all the vitriolic ridicule he’d heaped on Security. Half guiltily, he looked over his shoulder but the tail was not there—after all the trouble Dr. Mason had taken to lose him, it was hardly to be expected that he would be.

  Since Mason was a bachelor on the far side of middle age and not given to illicit love affairs, his tail had caused him no great inconvenience; but he had been annoying.

  Then there was the question of the boat.

  “We can’t let you go sailing out in that ocean all alone,” the security officer had protested. “Why, there could be a Soviet submarine—anything!”

  “No sailing, no work,” Dr. Mason had said, and since he was top man in his field the government had grudgingly given in. By now the government was used to mad scientists. The ironic part of it was that the place where Dr. Mason and his colleagues performed their highly secret mumbo-jumbo was jestingly known as the Saucer Works.

  After a Friday no more nerve-wracking than others, Dr. Mason had hurried down to the dock and raised sail. He ate his Spartan supper belowdecks while the well balanced rig tacked itself seaward into the evening breeze. Right on schedule as he reached the visibility limit of shore-based binoculars, th
e helicopter took off and fluttered gently in his direction.

  With a grin Dr. Mason peered out of his tiny porthole at the fog-bank which rolled toward his hard-driving little sloop. When the copter’s flutter faded away he knew the fog was mast high and they had once again lost him. A petty victory, but a man has to fight for some things. He lit his pipe and exhaled clouds of pure gloat.

  And now this!

  At first he had thought it was a buoy gone adrift. It was round and reasonably flat, but it was clean of barnacles and other sea growth. With a feeling of mounting excitement he had realized what it was—and also that there was no such thing.

  He sat in the cockpit and stared at it. Nothing happened. After a while he tied up to it with a line thin enough to break in the event of a sudden ascension. Even a flying saucer can become boring if the weather persists damp and raw and nothing happens for an hour. He knocked out his pipe and went below.

  When he woke again, the sun was at 8 o’clock and the fog nearly burned away. A small hatch opened aboard the saucer and a man looked out at him. “Hi,” the man said, “Coffee’s ready. Come aboard.”

  This isn’t really happening, Dr. Mason told himself, but he checked the line anyway. It was slightly frayed so he cut it loose and tied with a heavier one. Then he stepped into the saucer.

  The man poured two cups of coffee and dished up two plates of bacon and eggs. After a moment he served toast. “Cream?” the man asked.

  Mason nodded.

  “Sugar?”

  He nodded again.

  They breakfasted in companionable silence. Afterward he lit his pipe and the other man produced an oddly proportioned cigarette. “Well?” the other asked.

  “I was about to ask you the same question.”

  “Could you please be more specific?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Mason said. “Due to certain unusual qualifications, I know you’re not from Earth. Your equipment was not manufactured in the U.S. and your ability with bacon and eggs plus coffee is most assuredly not Russian. Ergo. . .”

  “That does away with tiresome explanations,” the other said gratefully. “You’re Kurt Mason, the big wheel of a certain laboratory.” It was a statement, not a question. “You work too hard. If you don’t watch your step you’ll make a discovery pretty soon. We’d just as soon you didn’t.”

  “Can’t anybody let a scientist alone?” Mason growled. “Who do you represent anyway?”

  “It was scientists,” the stranger said, “who undermined the old concept of an anthropomorphic god. When the Day of Jubilo was proclaimed at Los Alamos, the theologically dispossessed seized upon saucer sightings to formulate the hypothesis of an elder race—a gaggle of benign supermen who would scoop them out of trouble a microsecond before vaporization.”

  “Oh come now—” Mason began.

  “So the new god’s helpers don’t use wings. Very inefficient in vacuo.”

  Dr. Mason bowed ironically. “First time I’ve ever met an angel,” he said. “Were those psychoceramics right about the elder race?”

  “Psychoceramics? That wasn’t in my vocab tape.”

  “Crackpots,” Mason explained. “Exactly what do you want?”

  “Let’s put it this way. I get five demerits every time somebody spoils a planet in my sector. So it’s time you took a rest.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not much. Take a look in that mirror.”

  Mason stepped to a full-length mirror. There was a blurry instant, then his double stepped out of the mirror.

  “Meet your replacement,” the angel said.

  “Just where do I go while I’m being replaced?”

  “We’ll find a place for you.”

  “I just bet you will,” Mason grunted. He thought fleetingly of the last Yahi Indian who spent half his life fletching arrows and making fire without matches for goggling anthropologists. “Is he a perfect copy?” he asked.

  “Almost. Like most mirror images, he’s reversed. You’re left handed so he’ll be right. I doubt if anyone notices the difference.”

  Without warning Mason reached over the table and clouted the angel with the heavy coffee cup. The angel went down like a bathysphere. Mason turned to face his double and swung the cup again. As precisely as a mirror image, the double swung at him. They both connected.

  When Mason came to, his double and the angel were struggling to their feet. He picked up the coffee cup and administered another soporific to each.

  The sloop was still moored outside. He clambered aboard and rummaged through the after locker for bits of line. When he returned the other two were still out. He trussed them like a pair of mummies. Minutes later the sloop was on a broad reach back to the harbor and getting a little extra kick from the outboard. An hour later Dr. Mason thought he saw something flash overhead, but since that joker in New Mexico had been insisting that green fireballs in horizontal trajectory were nothing but meteorites, he couldn’t be sure what it was. He made his landfall and began the long reach up the bay. The incident was acquiring a dreamlike quality already.

  That evening he took a long and thoughtful walk along the cliffs, noting with minor annoyance that a stroller kept his distance but invariably walked the same way he did.

  Dr. Mason made a few more contributions to the lab’s program but in time it was decided that he’d burned himself out. They kicked him upstairs. Even though no longer useful in research, he proved an able administrator. His coordination isn’t what it used to be. Getting old and all that. Sometimes he absently starts scribbling with the wrong hand. He wonders if the mirror incident had anything to do with it. But by now he isn’t sure whether he dreamed it or maybe read it somewhere.

  He keeps a large can of oil aboard the sloop and when he’s far to sea, beyond the reach of Security, he takes off his arms and legs to oil them. He doesn’t think it odd, but he’s afraid Security might.

  The Sign of the Goose

  The damnedest things happen when Mr. Edmondson goes out with his mad friend. There are times when the glancingly revealed alien intelligences seem more rational, more orderly, than local ones . . . though such is not always the case.

  I FELT GUILTY ABOUT LEAVING Shapiro in a bind but a man needs a rest so, after several false starts, we were finally leaving. “Hold it,” I yelled, “Here’s the mailman.”

  “So what?” a wife inquired from the back seat.

  “Anyone,” my mad friend mumbled, “who’d make a remark like that knows nothing of writers.”

  The flimsy brown paper envelope was unstamped but bore the franking of an official communication from the government of a neighboring country. My mad friend pulled away while I opened it. “Do we know a Senora Epifania López Viuda de Fuentes?” I asked.

  Backseat discussion of whether the new botch look could be worn with open-toed sandals continued without interruption. I crumpled the letter and violated California’s anti-litter law. Three blocks later a wife asked, “Who?”

  “Epifania López, Viuda de Fuentes. I think it was.”

  “My aunt.”

  My mad friend braked and wordlessly retraced the three blocks. While he turned around again I rescued the crumpled letter from beneath a muzzled Volkswagen.

  “She’s going to be evicted if we don’t stop by the Recaudación de Rentas.”

  “Really my great aunt. I only saw her once when I was a child.”

  “Back to the subject,” my mad friend said. “In spite of Dogma and Eve, serpents are relatively unintelligent. As villains they’re even less plausible than bugeyed monsters. What d’you think of Sauerbraten?” he continued with his usual change of subject.

  “Then why? More logical that the fruit be offered by a politician. I’ll bet the serpent’s a Hebrew symbol of evil because some polytheistic neighbor worshipped his rat-trapping house snake. Sauerbraten’s fair but the Wiener Schnitzel’s better.”

  It being neither a horse nor dog racing day, traffic was light. Twenty minutes later m
y friend clenched teeth at the transition to the highways of a country which I charitably refrain from naming. “I can’t think of a more unlikely place for German cooking,” he mumbled. “Incidentally, does Recaudación de Rentas have anything to do with rent?”

  I shook my head. “It’s where you pay taxes and water bills and buy sheets of sealed paper whenever you need a copy of your ezcuintle’s birth certificate.”

  “My ezcuintles were all born in Gringoland,” my friend said.

  “It is not possible that my great aunt Epifania be evicted,” a wife said from the rear seat.

  “Why?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “An excellent reason,” my mad friend observed.

  “This will bear investigation,” I said prophetically. “Do you mind?”

  “I faint from hunger,” my friend answered, but he turned. We parked with some difficulty in a thoroughly dug up street.

  Recaudación de Rentas was a long narrow room on the ground floor of the Palacio. We stood before the counter for several minutes. Eventually Recaudacións single occupant finished filing her nails and swayed toward us like a vintage vamp. “Dígame,” she said apathetically.

  “It treats of this matter which I do not clearly understand—” I smoothed the crumpled letter.

  “Ah. First one goes to the Panteon Number Two.”

  “¿May one know where finds itself the Graveyard Number Two?”

  “Any gendarme will advise.”

  “¿May one ask where everyone went?” my mad friend inquired.

  “All gawk at an object which fell on the hill behind Cemetery Number Two.”

  “Egad!” my mad friend groaned.

  I suppose I should have called Shapiro and told him where our lost weather balloon fetched up. But there was no phone handy so we got in the car.

  “At least we can follow the crowd,” my friend said.

  “When do we eat?” a wife asked.

  “Soon,” I said hopefully.

  Four bum steers later we parked at Panteon Number Two. A multitude clambered from mound to headstone to sarcophagus, descending the hill behind the cemetery.