The Best of Richard Matheson

by Richard Matheson

He shoved the gum into his pocket. The station was trembling with the approach of a train. Carter’s eyes turned to the left. Far in the distance, he saw the red and green eyes of the Manhattan express. He turned back front. Replaced when? Last night, the night before, last year? No, it was impossible to believe.

  The train rushed by him with a blur of windows and doors. He felt the warmish, stale wind rush over him. He could smell it. His eyes blinked to avoid the swirl of dust. All this in seconds. As a machine, his reactions were so close to being human that it was incredible.

  The train screeched to a halt in front of him. He moved over and entered the car with the pushing crowd. He stood by a pole, his left hand gripping it for balance. The doors slid shut again, the train rolled forward. Where was he going? he wondered suddenly. Surely not to work. Where then? To think, he told himself. He had to think.

  That was when he found himself staring at a man standing near him.

  The man had a bandage on his left hand and the bandage was stained with oil.

  That sense of being frozen again—of his brain petrified by shock, his body still and numbed.

  He wasn’t the only one.

  —

  The neon sign above the door read EMERGENCY. Robert Carter’s hand shook as he reached for the handle and pulled open the door.

  It took no more than a moment to find out. There had been a traffic accident—a man driving to work, a flat tire, a truck. Robert Carter stood in the hallway staring in at the man on the table. He was being bandaged. There was a deep cut over his eye and oil was running down his cheek and dripping onto his suit.

  “You’ll have to go in the waiting room.”

  “What?” Carter started at the sound of the nurse’s voice.

  “I say you’ll have to—”

  She stopped as he turned away suddenly and pushed out into the April morning.

  Carter walked along the sidewalk slowly, barely able to hear the sounds of the city.

  There were other robots then—God only knew how many. They walked among men and were never known. Even if they were hurt they weren’t known. That was the insane part. That man had been covered with oil. Yet no one had noticed it except him.

  Robert Carter stopped. He felt so heavy. He had to sit down and rest a while.

  The bar had only one customer, a man sitting at the far end of the counter, drinking beer and reading a newspaper. Carter pushed onto a leather stool and hooked his feet tiredly around its legs. He sat there, shoulders slumped, staring at the counter’s dark, glossy wood.

  Pain, confusion, dread and apprehension mixed and writhed in him. Was there a solution? Or was he just to wander like this, hopeless? Already it seemed a month since he’d left his house. But then it wasn’t his house anymore.

  Or was it? He sat up slowly. If there were others like him, could Helen and the girls be among that number? The idea repelled and appealed at once. He wanted them back desperately—yet how could he feel the same toward them if he knew that they, too, were wire and metal and electric current? How could he tell them about it since, if they were robots, they obviously didn’t know it?

  His left hand thumped down heavily on the bar. God, he was so tired. If only he could rest.

  The bartender came out of the back room. “What’ll it be?” he asked.

  “Scotch on the rocks,” said Robert Carter automatically.

  Sitting alone and quiet as the bartender made the drink, it came to him. How could he drink? Liquid would rust metal, short out circuits. Carter sat there, tightening fearfully, watching the bartender pour. A wave of terror broke across him as the bartender came back and put the glass on the counter.

  No, this wouldn’t rust him. Not this.

  Robert Carter shuddered and stared down into the glass while the bartender walked off to make change for a five-dollar bill. Oil. He felt like screaming. A glass of oil.

  “Oh, my God . . .” Carter slipped off the stool and stumbled for the door.

  Outside, the street seemed to move about him. What’s happening to me? he thought. He leaned weakly against a plate-glass window, blinking dizzily.

  His eyes focused. Inside the cafeteria, a man and woman were sitting, eating. Robert Carter gaped at them.

  Plates of grease. Cups of oil.

  People walked around him, making him an island in their swirling midst. How many of them? he thought. Dear God, how many of them?

  What about agriculture? What about grain fields, vegetable patches, fruit orchards? What about beef and lamb and pork? What about processing, canning, baking? No, he had to go back, to retrench, to recapture simple possibility. He’d struck his head and was losing contact with reality. Things were still as they had always been. It was him.

  Robert Carter began to smell the city.

  It was a smell of hot oils and machinery turning, the smell of a great, unseen factory. His head snapped around, his face a mask of terror. Dear God, how many? He tried to run but couldn’t. He could hardly move at all.

  Robert Carter cried out.

  He was running down.

  He moved across the hotel lobby very slowly, with a halting, mechanical motion.

  “Room,” he said.

  The clerk eyed him suspiciously, this man with the ruffled hair, the strangely haunted look in his eyes. He was given a pen to sign the register.

  Robert Carter, he wrote very slowly, as if he had forgotten how to spell it.

  In the room, Carter locked the door and slumped down on the bed. He sat, staring at his hands. Running down like a clock. A clock that never knew its builder nor its fate.

  One last possibility—wild, fantastic, yet all he could manage now.

  Earth was being taken over, each person replaced by mechanical duplicates. Doctors would be first, undertakers, policemen, anyone who would come in contact with exposed bodies. And they would be conditioned to see nothing. He, as an accountant, would be high on the list. He was part of the basic commerce system. He was—

  Robert Carter closed his eyes. How stupid, he thought. How stupid and impossible.

  It took him minutes just to stand. Lethargically, he took out an envelope and a piece of paper from a desk drawer. For a moment his eye was caught by the Gideon Bible in the drawer. Written by robots? he thought. The idea repelled him. No, there must have been humans then. This had to be a contemporary horror.

  He drew out his fountain pen and tried to write a letter to Helen. As he fumbled, he reached into his pocket for the gum. It was a habit. Just as he was going to put it in his mouth, he became conscious of it. It wasn’t gum. It was a piece of solid grease.

  It fell from his hand. The pen slipped from his failing grip and dropped to the rug, and he knew he wouldn’t have the strength to pick it up again.

  The gum. The drink in the bar. The food in the cafeteria. His eyes raised, impelled.

  And what was beginning to rain down from the sky?

  The truth crushed down on him.

  Just before he fell, his staring gaze was fastened to the Bible once again. And God said let us make man in our image, he thought.

  Then the darkness came.

  ONE FOR THE BOOKS

  When he woke up that morning, he could talk French.

  There was no warning. At six-fifteen, the alarm went off as usual and he and his wife stirred. Fred reached out a sleep-deadened hand and shut off the bell. The room was still for a moment.

  Then Eva pushed back the covers on her side and he pushed back the covers on his side. His vein-gnarled legs dropped over the side of the bed. He said, “Bon matin, Eva.”

  There was a slight pause.

  “Wha’?” she asked.

  “Je dis bon matin,” he said.

  There was a rustle of nightgown as she twisted around to squint at him. “What’d you say?”

  “All I said was g
ood—”

  Fred Elderman stared back at his wife.

  “What did I say?” he asked in a whisper.

  “You said ‘bone matinn’ or—”

  “Je dis bon matin. C’est un bon matin, n’est-ce pas?”

  The sound of his hand being clapped across his mouth was like that of a fast ball thumping in a catcher’s mitt. Above the knuckle-ridged gag, his eyes were shocked.

  “Fred, what is it?”

  Slowly, the hand drew down from his lips.

  “I dunno, Eva,” he said, awed. Unconsciously, the hand reached up, one finger of it rubbing at his hair-ringed bald spot. “It sounds like some—some kind of foreign talk.”

  “But you don’t know no foreign talk, Fred,” she told him.

  “That’s just it.”

  They sat there looking at each other blankly. Fred glanced over at the clock.

  “We better get dressed,” he said.

  While he was in the bathroom, she heard him singing, “Elle fit un fromage, du lait de ses moutons, ron, ron, du lait de ses moutons,” but she didn’t dare call it to his attention while he was shaving.

  Over breakfast coffee, he muttered something.

  “What?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  “Je dis que veut dire ceci?”

  He heard the coffee go down her gulping throat.

  “I mean,” he said, looking dazed, “what does this mean?”

  “Yes, what does it? You never talked no foreign language before.”

  “I know it,” he said, toast suspended halfway to his open mouth. “What—what kind of language is it?”

  “S-sounds t’me like French.”

  “French? I don’t know no French.”

  She swallowed more coffee. “You do now,” she said weakly.

  He stared at the tablecloth.

  “Le diable s’en méle,” he muttered.

  Her voice rose. “Fred, what?”

  His eyes were confused. “I said the devil has something to do with it.”

  “Fred, you’re—”

  She straightened up in the chair and took a deep breath. “Now,” she said, “let’s not profane, Fred. There has to be a good reason for this.” No reply. “Well, doesn’t there, Fred?”

  “Sure, Eva. Sure. But—”

  “No buts about it,” she declared, plunging ahead as if she were afraid to stop. “Now is there any reason in this world why you should know how to talk French”—she snapped her thin fingers—“just like that?”

  He shook his head vaguely.

  “Well,” she went on, wondering what to say next, “let’s see then.” They looked at each other in silence. “Say something,” she decided. “Let’s—” She groped for words. “Let’s see what we . . . have here.” Her voice died off.

  “Say somethin’?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Un gémissement se fit entendre. Les dogues se mettent à aboyer. Ces gants me vont bien. Il va sur les quinze ans—”

  “Fred?”

  “Il fit fabriquer une exacte représentation du monstre.”

  “Fred, hold on!” she cried, looking scared.

  His voice broke off and he looked at her, blinking.

  “What . . . what did you say this time, Fred?” she asked.

  “I said—a moan was heard. His mastiffs began to bark. These gloves fit me. He will soon be fifteen years old and—”

  “What?”

  “And he had an exact copy of the monster made. Sans même l’entamer.”

  “Fred?”

  He looked ill. “Without even scratchin’,” he said.

  —

  At that hour of the morning, the campus was quiet. The only classes that early were the two seven-thirty Economics lectures and they were held on the White Campus. Here on the Red there was no sound. In an hour the walks would be filled with chatting, laughing, loafer-clicking student hordes, but for now there was peace.

  In far less than peace, Fred Elderman shuffled along the east side of the campus, headed for the administration building. Having left a confused Eva at home, he’d been trying to figure it out as he went to work.

  What was it? When had it begun? C’est une heure, said his mind.

  He shook his head angrily. This was terrible. He tried desperately to think of what could have happened, but he couldn’t. It just didn’t make sense. He was fifty-nine, a janitor at the university with no education to speak of, living a quiet, ordinary life. Then he woke up one morning speaking articulate French.

  French.

  He stopped a moment and stood in the frosty October wind, staring at the cupola of Jeramy Hall. He’d cleaned out the French office the night before. Could that have anything to do with—

  No, that was ridiculous. He started off again, muttering under his breath—unconsciously. “Je suis, tu es, il est, elle est, nous sommes, vous êtes—”

  At eight-ten, he entered the History Department office to repair a sink in the washroom. He worked on it for an hour and seven minutes, then put the tools back in the bag and walked out into the office.

  “Mornin’,” he said to the professor sitting at a desk.

  “Good morning, Fred,” said the professor.

  Fred Elderman walked out into the hall thinking how remarkable it was that the income of Louis XVI, from the same type of taxes, exceeded that of Louis XV by 130 million livres and that the exports which had been 106 million in 1720 were 192 million in 1745 and—

  He stopped in the hall, a stunned look on his lean face.

  That morning, he had occasion to be in the offices of the Physics, the Chemistry, the English and the Art Departments.

  —

  The Windmill was a little tavern near Main Street. Fred went there Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings to nurse a couple of draught beers and chat with his two friends—Harry Bullard, manager of Hogan’s Bowling Alley, and Lou Peacock, postal worker and amateur gardener.

  Stepping into the doorway of the dim-lit saloon that evening, Fred was heard—by an exiting patron—to murmur, “Je connais tous ces braves gens,” then look around with a guilty twitch of cheek. “I mean . . .” he muttered, but didn’t finish.

  Harry Bullard saw him first in the mirror. Twisting his head around on its fat column of neck, he said, “C’mon in, Fred, the whiskey’s fine,” then, to the bartender, “Draw one for the elder man,” and chuckled.

  Fred walked to the bar with the first smile he’d managed to summon that day. Peacock and Bullard greeted him and the bartender set down a brimming stein.

  “What’s new, Fred?” Harry asked.

  Fred pressed his mustache between two foam-removing fingers.

  “Not much,” he said, still too uncertain to discuss it. Dinner with Eva had been a painful meal during which he’d eaten not only food but an endless and detailed running commentary on the Thirty Years War, the Magna Charta and boudoir information about Catherine the Great. He had been glad to retire from the house at seven-thirty, murmuring an unmanageable, “Bon nuit, ma chère.”

  “What’s new with you?” he asked Harry Bullard now.

  “Well,” Harry answered, “we been paintin’ down at the alleys. You know, redecoratin’.”

  “That right?” Fred said. “When painting with colored beeswax was inconvenient, Greek and Roman easel painters used tempera—that is, colors fixed upon a wood or stucco base by means of such a medium as—”

  He stopped. There was a bulging silence.

  “Hanh?” Harry Bullard asked.

  Fred swallowed nervously. “Nothing,” he said hastily. “I was just—” He stared down into the tan depths of his beer. “Nothing,” he repeated.

  Bullard glanced at Peacock, who shrugged back.

  “How are your hothouse flowers c
oming, Lou?” Fred inquired, to change the subject.

  The small man nodded. “Fine. They’re just fine.”

  “Good,” said Fred, nodding, too. “Vi sono pui di cinquante bastimenti in porto.” He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes.

  “What’s that?” Lou asked, cupping one ear.

  Fred coughed on his hastily swallowed beer. “Nothing,” he said.

  “No, what did ya say?” Harry persisted, the half-smile on his broad face indicating that he was ready to hear a good joke.

  “I—I said there are more than fifty ships in the harbor,” explained Fred morosely.

  The smile faded. Harry looked blank.

  “What harbor?” he asked.

  Fred tried to sound casual. “I—it’s just a joke I heard today. But I forgot the last line.”

  “Oh.” Harry stared at Fred, then returned to his drink. “Yeah.”

  They were quiet a moment. Then Lou asked Fred, “Through for the day?”

  “No. I have to clean up the Math office later.”

  Lou nodded. “That’s too bad.”

  Fred squeezed more foam from his mustache. “Tell me something,” he said, taking the plunge impulsively. “What would you think if you woke up one morning talking French?”

  “Who did that?” asked Harry, squinting.

  “Nobody,” Fred said hurriedly. “Just . . . supposing, I mean. Supposing a man was to—well, to know things he never learned. You know what I mean? Just know them. As if they were always in his mind and he was seeing them for the first time.”

  “What kind o’ things, Fred?” asked Lou.

  “Oh . . . history. Different . . . languages. Things about . . . books and painting and . . . and atoms and—chemicals.” His shrug was jerky and obvious. “Things like that.”

  “Don’t get ya, buddy,” Harry said, having given up any hopes that a joke was forthcoming.

  “You mean he knows things he never learned?” Lou asked. “That it?”

  There was something in both their voices—a doubting incredulity, a holding back, as if they feared to commit themselves, a suspicious reticence.

  Fred sloughed it off. “I was just supposing. Forget it. It’s not worth talking about.”