The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  “It is a Klein bottle, Dennison. Are you familiar with the Moebius Strip?”

  “You mean a strip of paper you give a sort of twist to and then join its ends so that in effect it has one side only?”

  “Exactly. Well, a Klein bottle is like that, only in three dimensions. Its inside is its outside and vice versa. Do you understand?”

  I said I understood.

  He took it from me, looked at it with an expression of mixed pride and anger. “I have drilled into it, Dennison. I have used a little instrument with which surgeons look into our bodies’ inmost secrets. Inside it is a complex of beautifully ground crystals, and what seem to be controls and things I cannot put a name to. So far, it is the only unknown thing that has defeated me. I have had it several years, and I know no more about it than when it came to me, but my getting it could not have been an accident. It was part of the test, the challenge.”

  Shocked at his megalomania, I fumbled for something innocuous to say. “I—I suppose you have a pretty large collection by this time, Mr. Hoogstraten?”

  He replaced the Klein bottle in the cabinet. “A large collection?” He said it with a sneer. “Dennison, I have always two or perhaps three. They do not defeat me for very long. Indeed, this is the only one I have had to keep for several years.”

  “But what do you do with them?” I asked. “Do you give them away or sell them?”

  “Certainly not. When I have solved them, when they have served their purpose, I destroy them. That is the only way for me perhaps to get revenge, you understand?”

  Frankly, I was horrified. I started to protest that some of them were treasures, that they exhibited superb craftsmanship, that surely scientists would be interested in them.

  He cut me off before I had three words out. “Never!” he cried. “When I have solved them, they are nothing! Nothing! They no longer have a soul!”

  He paid me even more than he had previously, and exacted a promise that I’d keep hunting for him; and I left telling myself that no matter what I found, I’d never go back again.

  It was five months before I did, just after I returned from my annual trip to England, and then it was because I knew I had to see her one more time. In a sense, she had never left me. I would wake at night from my Pre-Raphaelite dreams of her, despairing, wondering how ever she could have married him—not for his money, certainly. But why, why, why?

  So I went back. The thing I’d found was simple—a crude tool, mysterious only in the fact that it had no discernible function. This time, when the man-servant admitted me, I saw that she wasn’t in the room, and all the while Hoogstraten examined what I’d brought him, I kept looking at the door through which she had come and gone, wishing, hoping.

  Finally he rose. “I will take the tool,” he told me, “even though it is not of so high a quality. I shall pay four hundred only.”

  I could control myself no longer. “I haven’t see Mrs. Hoogstraten,” I said, I hoped casually.

  He stopped counting money. For moments, those cold, glistening pupils stared at me. Then, “No,” he said, ever so gently. “You see—” he smiled, “—I found out what she was.”

  BUG-GETTER

  Ambrosius Goshawk was a starving artist. He couldn’t afford to starve decently in a garret in Montmartre or Greenwich Village. He lived in a cold, smoke-stained flat in downtown Pittsburg, furnished with enormously hairy overstuffed objects which always seemed moist, and filled with unsalable paintings. The paintings were all in a style strongly reminiscent of Rembrant, but with far more than his technical competence. They were absurdly representational.

  Goshawk’s wife had abandoned him, moving in with a dealer who merchandized thousands of Klee and Mondrian reproductions at $1.98 each. Her note had been scrawled on the back of a nasty demand from his dentist’s collection agency. Two shoddy subpoenas lay on the floor next to his landlord’s eviction notice. In the litter, unshaven and haggard, sat Amrosius Goshawk. His left hand held a newspaper clipping, a disquisition on his work by one J. Herman Lort, the nation’s foremost authority on Art. His right hand held a palette-knife with which he was desperately scraping little green crickets from the unfinished painting on his easel, a nude for which Mrs. Hoshawk had posed.

  The apartment was full of little green crickets. So, for that matter, was the Eastern half of the country. But Ambrosius Goshawk was not concerned with them as a plague. They were simply an intensely personal, utterly shattering Las Straw—and, as he scraped, he was thinking the strongest thoughts he had ever thought in his life.

  He had been thinking them for some hours, and they had, of course, travelled far out into the inhabited Universe. That was why, at three minutes past two in the afternoon, there was a whirr at the window, a click as it was pushed open from the outside, and a thud as a small bucket-shaped spaceship landed on the unpaid-for carpet. It opened, and a gnarled, undersized being stepped out.

  “Well,” he said, with what might have been a slightly curdled Bulgarian accent, “here I am.”

  Ambrosius Goshawk flipped a cricket over his shoulder, glared, and said, “No, I will NOT take you to my leader,” decisively. Then he started working on another cricket who had his feet stuck on a particularly intimate part of Mrs. Goshawk’s anatomy.

  “I am not interested with your leader,” replied the being, unstrapping a super-gadgety spray-gun. “You have thought for me, because you are wanting an extermination. I am the Exterminator. Johnny-with-the-spot, that is me. Pronounce me your troubles.”

  Ambrosius Goshawk put down his palette-knife. “What won’t I think of next?” he exclaimed. “Little man, because of the manner of your arrival, I will take you quite seriously. Seat yourself.”

  Then, starting with his failure to get a scholarship back in art school, he worked down through his landlord, his dentist, his wife, to the clipping by J. Herman Lort, from which he read the following passage:

  “…and it is in the work of these pseudo-creative people, of self-styled ‘artists’ like Ambrosius Goshawk, whose clumsily crafted imitations of photography must be a thorn in the flesh of every truly sensitive and creative critical mind, that the perceptive collector will realize the deeply-researched validness of the doctrine I have explained in my book “The Creative Critical Intellect”—that true Art can be ‘created’ only by such an intellect when adequately trained in an appropriately staffed institution, ‘created,’ needless to say, out of the vast treasury of natural and accidental-type forms—out of driftwood and bird-droppings, out of torn-up roots and cracked rocks—and that all the rest is a snare and a delusion, nay! an outright fraud.”

  Ambrosius Goshawk threw the clipping down. “You’d think,” he cried out, “that mortal man could stand no more. And now”—he pointed at the invading insects—“now there’s this!”

  “So,” asked the being, “what is this?”

  Ambrosius Goshawk took a deep breath, counted to seven, and screamed, “CRICKETS!” hysterically.

  “It is simple,” said the being. “I will exterminate. My fee—”

  “Fee?” Goshawk interrupted him bitterly. “How can I pay a fee?”

  “My fee will be paintings. Six you will give. In advance. Then I exterminate. After, it is one dozens more.”

  Goshawk decided that other worlds must have wealthy eccentrics. He watched while the Exterminator put six small paintings aboard, and he waved a dizzy goodbye as the spaceship took off. Then he went back to prying the crickets off Mrs. Goshawk.

  The Exterminator returned two years later. However, his spaceship did not have to come in through the window. It simply sailed down past the towers of Ambrosius Goshawk’s Florida castle into a fountained courtyard patterned after somewhat simpler ones in the Taj Mahal, and landed among a score of your women whose figures and costumes suggested a handsomely modernized Musselman heaven. Some were spl
ashing raw in the fountains. Some were lounging around Goshawk’s easel, hoping he might try to seduce them. Two were standing by with swatters, alert for the little green crickets which occasionally happened along.

  The Exterminator did not notice Goshawk’s curt nod. “How hard to have find you,” he chuckled, “ha-ha! Half-miles form north, I see some big palaces, ha, so! all marbles. From the south, even bigger, one Japanese castles. Who has built?”

  Goshawk rudely replied that the palaces belonged to several composers, sculptors, and writers, that the Japanese castle was the whim of an elderly poetess, and that the Exterminator would have to excuse him because he was busy.

  The Exterminator paid no attention. “See how has changing, your world,” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands. “All artists have many success. With yachts, with Rolls-Royces, with minks, diamonds, many round ladies. Now I take twelve more paintings.”

  “Beat it,” snarled Goshawk, “You’ll get no more paintings from me!”

  The Exterminator was taken aback. “You are having not happy?” he asked. “You have not liking all this? I have done job like my promise. You must paying one dozens more picture.”

  A cricket hopped onto the nude on which Goshawk was working. He threw his brush to the ground. “I’ll pay you nothing!” he shouted. “Why, you fake, you did nothing at all! ANY good artist can succeed nowadays, but it’s no thanks to YOU! LOOK AT ’EM—there are as many of these damned crickets as ever!”

  The Exterminator’s jaw dropped in astonishment. For a moment, he goggled at Goshawk.

  Then, “CRICKETS?” he croaked. “My God! I thought you said “CRITICS!”

  AUNT’S FLIGHT

  Charles Augustus Lindbergh was the first man to fly alone across the Atlantic—there’s no doubt about that—but he was not the first person to do so. That honor—and I believe we can all agree it was an honor—belongs to my great-aunt, Miss Trivia Lacklustre of Goose Falls, Massachusetts, where the Lacklustre side of our family has lived since the Seventeenth Century.

  She was a big, tall, gaunt woman with bright little black eyes in her pale face and her hair done in a great flat brown bun on the top of her head. (My father always insisted it wasn’t real hair at all but a specially large cow-flop she’d picked up someplace. But then he never did like her.) Anyhow, she’d inherited the old Lacklustre place, which she ran well enough, farming it with the help of a couple of hired men, and taking an active part in the doings of the Goose Falls Congregational Church, where everyone said she was sweet on old Mr. Barrow, the widowed pastor, who paid her no heed at all. Anything needed doing around the church or in the congregation, or for that matter in all of Goose Falls, what there was of it, she pitched in and did, elbowing aside anybody who got in her way. But the folks put up with it because she could always be counted on to help with the kids or take care of granny or bake a half-dozen big apple pies or come over quick if a sheep or something needed help birthing.

  Goose Falls didn’t exactly love Aunt Trivia, but they sure didn’t hate her. One thing especially they didn’t like was her doing all her shopping at Monkey Ward’s down to Salem instead of at Luke Correy’s general store. It seemed like she thought Goose Falls wasn’t good enough for her. (Of course, everybody else shopped at Monkey Ward’s too, but that was only once in a while. Remember, this was back in 1904, before the Wright Brothers had got off the ground at Kitty Hawk even, and she had to get her big bay horse harnessed up to the buckboard each time and drive clear over there, all of six miles.) Anyway, she did it, and it was there she bought all her brooms—all of them, because she went through brooms like old Sherman going through Georgia. Every time she took over from anybody, first thing she did was fetch her own broom and sweep the place out, sweeping like crazy. Didn’t matter was it the church or the Odd Fellows hall or the grocery store post office corner.

  Anyhow, every time she’d wear a broom out, she’d get mad as anything and hurry over to Monkey Ward’s to raise hell about it. She wouldn’t speak to anyone except the manager of the Housewares Department, Junius Brutus Badger himself—a thin, sour man with gray side-whiskers and a tight mouth, who always wore a heavy gold watch-chain with a funny green stone charm hung to it. The gossip was his family had been in Salem when the first Pilgrims got there, which made him a part Indian, I reckon. Mostly, folks were scared of him because he was so formal and cold, sort of like you’d expect of an undertaker. But not Great-aunt Trivia. No, sir!

  That summer, when she’d wore out a brand new broom in just one busy weekend, first thing Monday morning she brought it in, waving it under Junius Brutus’ nose like it was something dirty the cat’d done.

  “Look at this, Badger!” she cried. “Monkey Ward’s ought to be ashamed, they should, selling such trash! Why, I—”

  Mr. Badger interrupted her. “Montgomery Ward’s,” he declared frigidly. “Montgomery Ward’s, Mrs. Lacklustre.”

  Miss Lacklustre!” she shot back.

  Well, it was sort of a standoff. There they were, looking each other right in the eye, and she told me it was like his thinking engine was going eighty to the dozen, while she kept on waving that broom so the whole store could see it. It must’ve lasted two-three minutes, but finally he actually smiled, just a little, like a one-inch crack in an iceberg, but something she’d never seen him do before.

  “Mrs. Lacklustre,” he said, “You are an established customer—may I say a valued customer?—of Montgomery Ward’s. So—” He cleared his throat, and it sounded like something dry rubbing its hind legs together. “—so I shall bring you a new broom with our compliments. It is a very special broom, of an advanced design, and it will not only stand up to any usage you may put it to, but will also ease your labors.”

  “I’m not asking to ease up my labors!” sniffed Aunt Trivia, indignant that anybody’d think such a thing.

  “I shall have to go home to get it,” he continued, “for my family has been giving it its first trial, so I must ask you to wait—oh, perhaps fifteen minutes. If you’d care to go back to my office, I shall have one of the clerks prepare tea for you.”

  She didn’t answer him, but sat down, managing to convey the idea that she’d never accept tea from anyone who sold brooms that wore out before you could even get the school house swept out. While she waited, she voiced her complaints to every customer who came within range, and when Junius Brutus returned she was feeling quite a bit better.

  She regarded the broom he was carrying, and remarked she’d never seen the like of it in her born days, and wasn’t it too big to get into corners? and what kind of straw was it made of, all funny and foreign looking? and that sort of silvery wire it was bound to the stick with?

  Dubiously, she took it in hand. “Why, it hardly weighs anything!” she exclaimed, taking a couple of test swipes at the carpet.

  His hand on her elbow, Junius Brutus started escorting her to the door. “I can promise you that as your workday advances it’ll weigh less and less if you want it to. You’ll find it a most versatile broom, Mrs. Lacklustre—a true scientific triumph. And you’re the first to have one anywhere in these parts, at least nowadays—I mean before they come on the market, as it were. You’ll find it responding to you, Mrs. Lacklustre, so you mustn’t—” To her amazement, he actually winked at her. “—let too many people know about it. For business reasons, that is, yes indeed. No, don’t thank me. Thank Montgomery Ward’s.”

  He walked her clear to the buckboard, and helped her up into it, and it seemed to her that the broom in her hand was also giving her a help up.

  “Well, it better last longer than the last one you sold me,” she said ungraciously as she gathered the reins.

  “Oh, it will, it will!” Junius Brutus Badger assured her.

  •••

  As I may have suggested, Aunt Trivia was a woman of great strength of character, and when she began to find
out what her new broom really could do, it didn’t faze her one bit. She started right off by sweeping her kitchen, and right in the middle of it the egg man knocked at the door. “Well,” she said to the broom, like one talks to things when one’s alone. “You just stand there till I see who’s here. I’ll be back in two shakes.”

  Without looking she went to lean it back in a corner, got her eggs, said good-bye to the egg man, and turned back to it. It wasn’t leaning against the wall. Broom end up, it was standing straight up on its end, waiting for her.

  “Sakes alive!” she exclaimed, mightily pleased. “Why, I bet you could fly clear up to the ceiling had you a mind to!”

  Slowly, the broom rose till its straws touched the ceiling, where it brought down a cobweb she’d not seen before.

  “Why, it’s just like those books by Mr. Jules Verne!” she thought; and after that there was nothing for it but she had to experiment. It didn’t take her more’n half a day to find out the broom could not only fly by itself, but also carry anything she put on it, including herself.

  “It’ll be just the thing to take little rides on in the cool of the evening,” she thought, “specially if I fix me some sort of sidesaddle. I’m sure not going to try straddling a hard, narrow thing like that broom handle. Besides, it wouldn’t be modest.”

  She got to work and fixed up a sort of sidesaddle out of an old leather seat cushion, with a clamp to fasten it on with, but so she could take it off in no time when she had sweeping to do; and she started taking short flights after nightfall, first making sure the hired hands wouldn’t catch on. She knew about the old days in Salem, and what they did to women they suspected of broom-riding and such, and she didn’t want anyone getting ideas even though she knew her broom was some kind of new French invention.