Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  At which point the Earth opened (or so it seemed) and swallowed him up.

  Or down.

  Amidst the groans and shrieks of the affrighted passengers none was louder than that of The Kerry Pig, who found himself spread all over the progressive matron in harlequins, whose too-tight bermudas under stress and strain had popped seams, gores, and gussets all to Hell and gone. A close second, however, in the Terrified Scream Department was the matron herself, who was not only badly hung-up by the sudden come-down, but did not realize that The Pig was as pure in mind, word, and contemplated deed as the Snowe before the Soote hath Smutch’t it; and feared grievously that he would do her a mischief.

  And whilst the lot of them writhed and roared like Fiends in the Pit, a work crew from the office of the Borough President, which had dug clear across Wooster Street a trench worthy of Flanders’ Field, mud and all, but had neglected to barricade it properly, gathered round the rim and shook their fists, threatening the abruptly disembogued with dark deeds if they did not instantly quit the excavation and cease interfering with the work. “Dig we must!” one of the drudge roustabouts chittered, half in frenzy, half by rote. At first the language of the navvies was sulphurous in the extreme, but on observing that the fosse contained numerous women, none of whom were old, and all of whom were distressed, they became gallantly solicitous and reached down large hairy hands to help the ladies out.

  The men were allowed to emerge as best they might.

  Red Fred surveyed, aghast, the splintered wreckage of his equipage.

  And, having seen it all from her place across the street, Aunt Annie De Kalb, a wee wisp of a woman, but with the tensile strength of beryllium steel, hurried across with band-aids, germicides, words of comfort, and buckets of hot nourishing lentil soup. In this mission of mercy she was ably assisted by her barmaids, Ruby and Gladys, both graduates of the Municipal Female Seminary on Eighth and Greenwich, where they had majored in handling obstreperous bull dykes; and Aunt Annie’s bouncer, Homer, a quiet sullen homunculus whose every lineament bespoke, not gratified desire, but a refutation of the charge that Piltdown Man was a hoax. In a trice they had jostled away the lewd excavators (eye-intent on garter belts, pudenda and puffies) and were busy with the Florence Nightingale bit.

  Fred tottered to a telephone in the Ale House to call a garage. He found the instrument pre-empted by Doc Lem Architrave, an unfrocked osteopath, who was vainly trying to impress Bellevue with the urgent need for an ambulance.

  “—fractures, dislocations, and hemorrhages,” the ex-bone-popper was shouting: “Cheyne-Stokes breathing, cyanosis, and prolapses of the uteri!”

  “Yeah, well, like I say,” a bored voice on the other end of the line said, “when a machine comes in, which we can spare it, we’ll, like, send it out presently. How do you, like, spell ‘Wooster’? Is it W-u- or W-o-u?”

  Fred tottered out again.

  He found that all the victims, their own wounds forgotten, were now gathered six and seven deep in a circle around Wallace Fish, who was lying on the ground, flat on his back, and drumming his heels. His collar had been ripped open, revealing a throat as reddish-purple, congested, and studded with bumps as his face. Big Patsy was trying, so far successfully, to ward off a boss-ditchdigger who, convinced that the afflicted had suffered a crushed trachea, proposed to open a fresh respiratory passage with a knife the approximate size of a petty officer’s cutlass.

  “He’s been poisoned!” cried a voice in the crowd.

  “Flesh, probably,” insisted another yet, a jackhammer operator whose numerous tattoos peeped coyly through a thicket of hair as black and springy as the contents of an Edwardian sofa. “I hope this will be a lesson to you, fellows, about eating flesh. Now we vegetarians—”

  Big Patsy turned control of the putative performer of tracheotomies over to Homer, who held him a la Lascoon, and bent solicitously over his stricken liege-man, who gurgled wordlessly.

  “It might be something he eat,” he admitted. “Wallace has what I mean a very sensitive stomach and—” A sudden idea transfixed him visibly. He turned his head. “Aunt Annie,” he demanded, “what, besides lentils, was in that now hot soup which we all, including Wallace, partook of so heartily to soothe our jangled nerves?”

  Fred tried to indicate to him, by winks, shrugs, twitches, and manual semaphore, that he and his two genossen were supposed to be beatniks, names unknown; and that such revelatory references were dangerous and uncalled for, and, in all probability, ultra vires and sub judice. But to no avail.

  “Why,” said Aunt Annie, a shade vexed that her cuisine be called into question; “it was a nice fresh chowder, the speciality for today, with some lovely sweet plum tomatoes, lentils to be sure, a few leeks which I scrubbed them thoroughly, and a mere sprinkling of marjoram, fennel, and dill—”

  “Chowder? What kind of chowder?”

  “Why, codfish,” said Aunt Annie.

  Big Patsy groaned. The Kerry Pig whimpered, and knelt in prayer. Wallace turned up his eyes, gagged, and drummed his heels once again. 6/8 time.

  “Codfish. A salt-water fish. And Wallace with his ellegy—Get a ambulance!” the words broke from his chest in an articulate roar.

  Once again Red Fred trotted for the phone, and once again he was beaten to it by Doc Lem Architrave, whose appearance on the streets so early in the day must be attributed to his having been hauled from his bed at the Mills Hotel peremptorily to do his deft (though alas! illicit) best to relieve the population explosion on behalf of some warm-hearted Village girl who had probably breezed in from New Liverpool, Ohio, only a few months previously; for, had she been around the Village longer, she had known better than to—

  But enough.

  Once again the Doc dialed Bellevue, but this time he was answered by a voice as sharply New England as the edge of a halibut knife.

  “Aiyyuh?” asked the voice.

  “Ambulance!” yelled Doc Architrave. “Corner Wooster and Bleecker! Emergency case of codfish allergy!”

  “Codfish allergy?” The voice was electrified. “Well. I snum! Sufferin’ much? I presume likely! Ambulance Number Twenty-Three! Corner of Wooster and Bleecker! Codfish allergy. Terrible thing!” And, over the phone, the sound of Number Twenty-Three’s siren was heard to rise in an hysterical whine and then die off in the distance.

  In what seemed like a matter of seconds the same sound began to increase (this is called the Doppler effect) and Old 23 came tearing up to the side of the stricken Wallace. Treatment was prompt and efficacious and involved the use of no sesquipedalian wonderomyacin: a certain number of minims of adrenalin, administered hypodermically (the public interest—to say nothing of the AMA—forbids our saying exactly how many minims) soon had him right as rain again. He was standing on his feet when Red Fred, alerted by the almost osmotic disappearance of Doc Lem Architrave, observed that the fuzz had made the scene after all.

  The carabinieri consisted of, reading them left to right, Captain Cozenage, Patrolman Ottolenghi, Police-Surgeon Anthony Gansevoort, and Sergeants G. C. and V. D. O’Sullivan: the latter being identical twins built along the lines of Sumo wrestlers, commonly, if quizzically, referred to (though never in their presence) as The Cherry Sisters.

  Red Fred, Big Patsy, Wallace “Gefilte” Fish, and The Kerry Pig, swallowed. He swallowed, we swallowed, they swallowed all four.

  After a short and pregnant pause, the next voice heard was that of Ottolenghi, “The wicked fleeth,’” he observed, more in sorrow than in wrath, “when no man pursueth.’”

  The Kerry Pig, Wallace “Gelfilte” Fish, Big Patsy, and Red Fred hung their heads.

  “Well, you have led us a merry chase,” commented Dr. Gansevoort, “haven’t they boys?” Cozenage said, “Ha.” Or—to be more precise—“Ha!” Ottolenghi sighed softly. The twins O’Sullivan made, as one man, a deep, disgruntled-sounding noise which started somewhere near the sphincter pylorus and thence spread outward and upward; not unlike that made by the Great Barren Land G
rizzly when disturbed untimely during the mating season. Eskimo legend to the effect that this creature’s love-spasms last nine days is, in all likelihood, grossly exaggerated.

  “We had heard that you had heard that we were looking for you in connection with the sudden death of Angie the Rat,” continued the police-surgeon. “But—for some reason—we have been unable to make contact with you to confirm what doubtless reached your ears as a rumor. Namely that, acting on information received from the personal physician of the late Rat, an autopsy was performed upon him in addition to the routine excavations required by law. Which revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt that he dropped dead of a heart condition of long-standing, aggravated by the consumption of one dozen veal-stuffed peppers, two bowls of minestrone, and a pint of malaga, just before he stepped out of the restaurant to the scene of his death.”

  Again a silence, broken only by the burly jackhammer-man’s warning his compeers yet again to avoid the fatal lure of flesh-eating.

  “Then—” began Big Patsy. “You mean—We didn’t—They aren’t—”

  “Yes?”

  “That is—uh—nobody is what you might call guilty? Of having murdered the Rat, I mean?”

  The police-surgeon smiled. “Nobody at all,” he said. “Oh, those bullets you put into him would have caused him a more than merely momentary inconvenience had he been alive at the time of their entry. But as he had died about a second before, why—”

  Big Patsy guffawed. Wallace chuckled. The Kerry Pig tittered. Red Fred sighed happily. “In that case,” said Big Patsy, “we three are as free as birds, are we not? The minions of the law have nothing on us.”

  But, oh, he was so very, very wrong. See now Captain Cozenage begin a smile like that of a Congo crocodile making ready for the dental attentions of the dik-dik bird.

  “Inasmuch as the late deceased was dead at the time the bullets struck his inert flesh, the utterers of said bullets—namely you—are thereby guilty of mutilating a corpse. An offense, may I point out to you, under the Body-Snatchers’ Act of 1816 as revised, 1818. Take them away, boys,” he said.

  Ottolenghi secured the poor Pig, whilst the Troll Twins each applied a hand, or hands, to the persons of Big Patsy and Wallace “Gefilte” Fish.

  “All right, you people,” said the Captain, as the doors of the pie wagon closed behind Jeans Valjeans I, II, and III, “break it up…”

  Red Fred stood for a moment not daring to move. But, it was soon clear, the cops were not interested in him. Not today, anyway. His reverie was broken by the voice of the matron in harlequin spectacles. “Under the circumstances,” she said, holding her burst bermudas together in a manner not altogether adequate, “I’m afraid our Protest Pilgrimage to City Hall is out. Inasmuch as you have failed to fulfill your contract, verbal as it was. To transport us, no liability lies against us. In other words,” she concluded, waspishly, “we don’t owe you a grumpkin, buster!”

  And she marched away, wig-wagging steatopygously.

  The by-now-thoroughly bemused Fred stood and stared. He was free of the local Lubianka, true, but that said, what remained? His only means of livelihood now lay shattered at the bottom of a municipal ditch, and already the ditchdiggers were making coarse suggestions as to what he might do with it. There was nothing else but submission to the extortionate demands of a towing-and-repair service. If, indeed, the poor snailery was not beyond both.

  At that moment there was a roaring and a rushing. Braking to a sudden halt were two hot-rods and a dozen motorcycles. Out (and off) climbed a number of young men clad in black-leather jackets with eagles on the back; and with hair trimmed in the manner of the rectal feathers of the order Anatidae.

  “Oh, no!” groaned Fred. “A rumble! That’s all I need!”

  “Par’m me, sir,” said the first young man, “but you got us all wrong.” He plucked a piece of pasteboard from the pocket of his black leather jacket and handed it over.

  THE CAVALIERS

  Offering gratuitous service

  to distressed motorists

  Scarcely had Fred finished perusing this card when the Cavaliers began hoisting his choo-choo out of the slough. Producing tools, they set to work and soon had it deftly repaired, save for a few chips of paint and a broken anterior tentacle, Bellerphonically-speaking.

  “Well, I’ll be doodly-darned,” said Fred. The polite young man smiled thinly.

  “We hope you are satisfied, sir,” he said, “with our sincere efforts to assist you. We hope that this gesture and others of the same nature will help counteract an unfortunate public impression that we hot-rodders and motorcyclists are juvenile delinquents, which it’s a lie, Pops, I mean like Sir, and if anybody says different we’ll cream them, dig?”

  And with a nod and brief smiles all around, the Cavaliers hopped into the saddles, kicked up power, and were gone with a roar and a cloud of dust.

  “Well, I’ll be doodly-darned,” Fred repeated. Then he snapped to. He looked around. There was still quite a sizeable crowd.

  “Here you are, folks,” he chanted. “Step right up. Red Fred’s Village Voyages. Guided tours to picturesque, bohemian Greenwich Village and The Bowery. A broken heart for every bright light. Take your seats while they last. Step right up…”

  INTRODUCTION

  Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison

  RUNESMITH

  Sturgeon and I go back many years. No words by me are needed to add to the luster or familiarity of his reputation and his writings. Of his personal warmth and understanding of people I’ve written at length in Dangerous Visions and elsewhere, as I have written of his many kindnesses to me.

  Ted came out to the Coast about five years ago and stayed with me for a while, and we got to know each other almost better than we wanted to. (Picture this, if you will: Ted has a penchant for running around in the buff; that’s cool; I do it myself a lot of the time. But I make these tiny concessions to propriety when I know nice people with easily-blown minds are coming to the house; I wear a towel. After the first few incidents—a cookie-peddling Brownie ran screaming, an Avon lady had an orgasm on my front stoop, a gentleman of undetermined sexual gender started frothing—I suggested to Ted that while he had one of the truly imposing physiques of the Western World, and while we all loved him sufficiently to overlook the vice squad pigs who came to the door at the request of the Brownie’s den momma, that he would make me much happier if he would for Christ’s sake put on something. So he wandered around wearing these outrageous little red bikini underpants.)

  (For his part, Ted had to put up with my quixotic morality, which flails wildly between degenerate and Puritan. I would catch him, from time to time, when I’d done something either terribly one or the other, with a look on his face usually reserved for Salvation Army musicians who find their street corner is occupied by a nasty drunk lying in the gutter.)

  But we managed to be roommates without too much travail, and during that period I suggested to Ted we do a story that we could dedicate to the memory of Dr. Paul Linebarger, who wrote speculative fiction of the highest order under the name Cordwainer Smith. Ted thought that was a pretty fair idea, so I typed out the title “Runesmith” and sat down—I type titles standing—and did the first section, up to the sentence, Smith, alone.

  Then!

  Then, the dumb motherfucker pulled one of those wretched tricks only a basically evil person can conceive. He decided in between paragraphs that he didn’t care for the way the story was going and he wrote the section beginning with Alone and ending—without hope of linking or continuing—at the sentence that begins The final sound of the fall was soft…

  “Now what the hell is that supposed to be?” I demanded, really pissed-off. Sturgeon just smiled. “How do you expect me to proceed from there, you clown? Everybody knows the plot has to start emerging in the first 1500 words, and you’ve tied me off like a gangrenous leg!” Sturgeon just smiled. “I suppose you think that’s funny, dump the hero into a pit, he can’t get out, the lio
ns are gnawing at his head. You think that’s really funny. Dumb is what it is, Ted, it is a dumb!” Sturgeon just smiled.

  I threw my hands in the air, dumped the six pages of the story in a file for a week, and didn’t get back to it till I’d calmed down. Then I went on and wrote—struggling to smooth the break between my first and second sections and that gibberish of his—the section running from Smith backed to the wall of the landing to the section where he returns to his former lodgings, where the mistake was first made. (But much of what you now find in that longish section came in rewrite. It was only three pages of typescript originally.)

  Then I gave it to Ted. Twenty-six months passed. Finally, I called him—he was long-since gone from my house, where it was possible to get an armlock on him—and told him if he wasn’t going to get off his ass and finish the story, to return it to me so I could lift out that demented section he’d written, and complete it myself. Nine months passed.

  So I called him and told him I’d trash his damned house, rape his old lady, murder his kids, loot his exchequer, pillage his pantry, burn his silo, slaughter his oxen, pour salt on his fields and in general carry on cranky. Four months passed.

  So I had a lady friend call him and tell him I was dying of the Dutch Elm Blight, lying on my death bed and asking, as a last request, for the story. He went to the mountains with his wife and kids for a holiday.

  What is all this nonsense about Sturgeon understanding love?!?! I screamed, stamping my foot.

  Two weeks later Dr. Jekyll waltzed into the house and handed me the completed first draft, smiled, went away. I didn’t waste any time. I rewrote it from stem to stern, cackling fiendishly all the while, sent it off, and kept the money!

  Now how about that, Sturgeon!

  Runesmith Dedicated to the Memory of Cordwainer Smith