by Anthology
Mullen’s lower jaw was nearly resting on his collar by this time.
“Incidentally,” I asked, “how is the darling girl? Has she enjoyed the European tour so far?”
“Leave her out of this,” he managed to say. But his tone was defensive.
“Poor Mullen,” I sighed. “She’s still keeping the reins on you, huh? I pity you, feller. I know just how it is. I’m under the Iron High Heel myself. You’ll have to meet my wife sometime.”
“This is too much! Two of you? Too damned much! A double haunt!” Mullen frowned. Then he began to laugh at his own cesspool thoughts. “How do you make out, mister?”
I considered explaining to him, but decided he’d never understand. “Wife” was the simplest way I could describe “her”—the only way in earthly language.
“Your mind needs deodorizing,” was all I said.
“So does this whole situation. Hey, if these forecasts of yours turn out right, how about giving me the winners at Ballymuchray this afternoon?”
Mullen was recovering pretty quickly, it seemed.
I said: “I don’t play the horses. Neither do you. If you’ve finished down here, you might as well get up to the kitchen and make yourself some coffee. No need to check that wiring any more. I’ve already done it. You’ve got a lazy morning ahead.”
“The morning,” he said, “hasn’t yet started. I’m not awake yet.”
“So now I’m in a dream, am I? Get upstairs before I bat you with a clod of hard air.”
He muttered his way up to the kitchen, plunked an open pot on the stove which he’d already lighted. Blue smoke puffed intermittently between the bars, filling the place with pungent haze.
Mullen looked up at the ceiling, addressed it politely: “I suppose, Mr. Fixit, you can tell me what’s wrong with this thing?”
“Naturally. Get hold of the poker and belt that flue-pipe about halfway up. The plate’s jammed and doesn’t operate from the outside. Shank broke off way back.”
He belted. The fire roared up suddenly.
“Thanks,” he said. “Could I interest you in a cup of coffee?”
“Funny man,” I grunted.
While he sipped his brew, I slipped out to tell my “wife” how things were shaping up.
My wife was born to lay the eggs and crow as well. Ever hear of a henpecked ghost? That’s me. I’d suffered two hundred years of hell from her tongue. Blamed me for everything. She even beefed about my innocent games of chess with Johnnie Maur.
And I remember when the Marchmont family was in occupation of Thaughbeen House she’d scared half the life out of little Lilian Marchmont just because I happened to remark casually on her good looks. That gives you a picture of my wife—a possessive shrew, to keep it in human terms which really don’t apply very well.
She started in on me now, so I grabbed up the chess board and pieces from the attic and skipped down from the Tenth Plane, where she was lying up and waiting for me to do most of the work.
When I got back to the kitchen, Mullen was tapping at the walls and ceiling with a broomstick.
“No secret panels or hidden amplifiers,” I said. “It’s all genuine psychic phenomena.”
He looked round and breathed heavily. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
I dumped the chess board and pieces on the kitchen table. “No,” he said. “No. I’m not going to confirm myself in my own madness. Take ’em away.”
I started setting out the pieces. He watched with a kind of horrible deadpan fascination. In a far-away voice he said: “Queen on her own color.”
“That’s better,” I said. “Pull up a chair.”
He went to the kitchen window, looked at the soft sunlight glancing through the apple trees. He looked for quite a while. Then he shrugged, grabbed a chair and came back to the table. “Anywhere but Ireland,” he observed, “I’d have run halfway to Thaughbeen by now.”
Twice during the game, which stretched out over three hours, he tried to make talk, but I dodged the questions. Once he made a grab in the air over my QKt as I was making a move.
“Can you,” I asked politely, “feel a magnetic field? Or an air-current, if your hand is moving with it? Or put a halfnelson on a frame of reference? Or poke a De Sitter antiparticle in the eye?”
He gave up.
Finally, as we heard the clattering roar of McGuire’s cartage van down the road, he said: “This is the damnedest game, in more than one sense. Check. Hold it until I’m back.”
I heard them dumping the stuff into the hall; and a female voice ordering the carter around; and the bland, blarneying voice of McGuire somehow soaring above the authoritative female voice and quelling it.
When Mullen came back into the kitchen, he looked determined. He closed the door carefully behind him.
“McGuire,” he said, “is a breath of fresh air. Sanity returns. I’ve just realized what I’ve been doing all morning. I’ve a helluva lot of work on hand and I can’t get on with it until this is straightened out. And I’m not going to have my wife scared. Now—just what are you, and what’s your racket?”
“Patience, pal,” I said. “Finish the game, then I’ll talk. I fixed you some fresh coffee.” Voices were raised again in the hall. “Incidentally, I don’t think your wife scares easy. She’s busy for a while anyway. Your move.”
He gulped coffee, watched me interpose on his check and threaten his own king simultaneously. He was compelled to exchange pieces. Which made it a draw.
“You’ve been playing for that,” he accused.
I sighed. “Not deliberately. If we played a dozen games, they’d end up on a draw. Or a stalemate.”
“I don’t get it. Quit the crosstalk. What are you?”
He sat more easily in his chair. He frowned at the coffee. I hoped I hadn’t laced it too much. He’d get the idea soon enough anyway.
“You’ve got a couple of books in your bag,” I said. “One is a pretty detailed family history of this place, written and published at his own expense—because no one else would be interested—by Mister Patrick O’Rourke, Gentleman, at the turn of the century.
“There are only passing, deprecatory references to me in that. He never took kindly to the idea of a family banshee, or banshees. The other was written twenty years ago by an earnest and sober investigator from the English Psychical Research Society. It’s my biography. My wife, being what you’d call plumb lazy, never made an appearance for him. I’ve often regretted that the Society never got around to following up his report. I’d have shown ’em plenty.”
“Then you are a haunt,” Mullen said. “A plain, ornery haunt! But how do you tick? How do you move things around?”
“A disembodied psyche——” I began.
That got him. He snapped up straight and mouthed for breath. Coffee slopped over the table. It didn’t matter. He’d drunk enough for my purpose.
“A disembodied psyche,” I repeated firmly, “which is a focus of consciousness freed from hindering matter, and thus from the bonds of inertia and entropy, not to mention sex, can be a pretty powerful thing. It doesn’t upset any energy balance because it utilizes extant potentials.”
His eyes were growing rounder. He tried to get up, then slumped back.
“You soon master the mechanics of perception for yourself,” I said. “It’s largely a matter of that curious mental force called imagination. And you learn how to induce illusion in others. But it takes around ten years before you find a way to store enough free energy from cosmic sources in your own field-web of anti-particles to move solid objects around.”
He had trouble with his voice. “Ten years—ten years from when?”
“From pretty damn soon,” I said sweetly.
“Then you’re—you’re—” He gulped. His eyes were glazing.
“That’s right,” I said. “Sleep tight, brother.”
I was testing the last circuit when he came around. He opened his eyes and moaned a little.
“Don’t worry about t
he slight hangover,” I said. “I’ll be taking it over in a moment.”
He looked around at the set-up. Only his head could move. The rest of him was tied pretty firmly in the stasis area.
“Pretty neat, huh?” I said. “It would have taken you months. Years, maybe. It probably did—once. That’s something I’ve never figured out. It took me four hours flat, with the know-how. I had two hundred years to work it out.”
Mullen muttered: “It’s a dream.”
I said: “Check. That’s how the thing started—if it ever did start. With Dunne’s theories of precognition and postcognition in dreams—a freed psyche moving backwards and forwards in time. Or—as in this case—staying put and letting time flow by. No mass, so no trouble with entropy or inertia. All the bug-bears of time-travel smoothed out.”
He’d gone bug-eyed again. I could almost see his brain wriggling.
“What happens when I—when yon—when this body dies?”
“You answered that question when you devised the math,” I said. “Does the past die? No. It’s co-existent. Effective immortality.”
“But death——”
“Is pretty final,” I agreed. “Dust to dust, et cetera. And since we don’t believe in an afterlife, that makes it a tough problem. But you’ve got a couple of centuries to figure that one out, too.”
“You mean—you have figured it?”
“No. I didn’t. You didn’t. We didn’t. We never will because we never have.”
“How many times has this happened?”
“Once,” I said patiently. “This is the first time. It always is.”
“But with memory of this conversation, I can change the pattern! I can——”
Then he got the idea. His mouth dropped open. Slack-jawed dope. . . .
“That’s it,” I said. I felt sorry for him, as usual. “You’ve already tried everything. You can’t even leave the place until this turns up.” I prodded his stomach. “It’s the only body our psychic matrix will fit into, and there’s a psychic compulsion to stay right here until it arrives. You can’t lick time. You never could.”
I stood by the switch. The tubes began to heat up.
“No!” he yelled. “Hold it—about my wife——”
“Our wife,” I corrected him, looking around cautiously. This time I might get away with it. Maybe the pattern wouldn’t always be the same. It was worth trying anyway. “You’ll find her on the Tenth Plane when you dope out how to get there,” I said.
“Here goes.” I gave him the wave-off sign. “I’ve got a date with a bottle of Jamieson’s Irish whisky and a fishing rod. By the way, when you meet up with old Johnnie Maur again, give him my love. He won’t understand. He never does. Look out for his rook game in the end-play.
“So long, sucker,” I said. “Good haunting.”
I was reaching for the switch, when——
“Hold it or I’ll blast you!”
I sighed resignedly and looked at the cellar steps. A body slumped inelegantly into view, dangling like a puppet from invisible strings.
The voice came from above its head.
How I hate that voice.
“Dear, sweet Bernie,” cooed my wife dangerously. “Trying it again? Don’t you ever learn? If you touch that switch before my say-so, I’ll fry that body of yours as soon as spit-in-your-eye.”
Mullen choked: “That’s Betty!”
“Uh-huh,” I murmured. “And that’s Betty’s body. She wants it back. I always try to leave her behind, but I guess I never succeed. I’d like to try living with a wife I haven’t lived with for two hundred years as a ghost. But she’s spent months soaking up energy on the Tenth Plane, and if I don’t play ball she’ll burn my body before I get it.”
“How right, darling,” said Betty. Arsenic and molasses in that voice . . . “Now tie this down in the stasis field.”
I looked at the limp, blonde head and laughed. “I suppose you whanged her with the skillet again?”
“That’s my headache,” the voice snapped.
“How very, very right! That’s why I’m laughing, sweetheart.”
I laid Betty’s unconscious head near Mullen’s—that is, near my—shoulder. She stirred a little and moaned. I passed ropes over her and through the ring-bolt of the time-lock and stood back.
“Don’t we look sweet?” I said.
“Beautiful,” said Betty. “Now pull that switch.”
I went to the handle.
“No—” pleaded Mullen.
“Yes,” ordered Betty.
I pulled.
For a millisecond, a soft, impossible wind soughed through intergalactic nothingness. A condition of no-life. Binary stars flamed into view. Incorporate with a star, become corporeal, or cease . . . An incredible longing, fulfilled at its conception . . . Homing to this star—NO! GET OUT! OCCUPIED! OCCUPIED! INCORPORATE OR CEASE!
The time-lock snapped open, and ropes loosened round my body.
Body.
Beautiful word.
Even with a headache like this.
Headache!
I gave a little scream and sat up.
Mullen—I mean me—I mean Betty—stood there grinning like an ape. “Beat you to it, heel,” she—he—said.
I’d been wrong about the psychic matrix.
That damned woman had always wanted to wear the trousers. Now she was wearing them, the ones that should have been mine.
A little matter like the sex of the body I inhabit shouldn’t really matter, of course. Sex doesn’t really apply to me, as such. But . . .
Do women have to wear their girdles as tight as this?
She Who Laughs by Peter Phillips. Copyright, 1952, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Scott Meredith.
FLETCHER PRATT
Fletcher Pratt, on the testimony of his secretary, is the most unusual writer in the world. In the first place, he writes (several score books, with short stories and articles beyond counting)—which is manifestly unfair to the rest of us who belong to that race of camouflaged dilettantes called writers. In the second place, he keeps regular hours and displays no temperament—a far cry from the sustained benzedrine-and-black-coffee agonies of creation that are the hallmark of most writers and the bane of most writers’ wives. These charges are in themselves serious enough to strip him of all his honors in the profession; the only thing that saves him is that, in spite of his eccentricities, he manages to turn out histories as admirable as Ordeal by Fire, biographies as careful and evocative as his recent Stanton, and short science-fiction stories as sheerly enjoyable as——
Official Record
First Report of the First Kurada Expedition (by radio) Intelligent Lord:
Your expedition is a success!
This report is sent from a point fifteen philads inside Kurada. There has been no opposition. The inhabitants are docile, most deformed, and without cultural activity, as predicted by the Scientific Board. They will make admirable laborers under our direction, while their deformities render them so repulsive that there will be little temptation for even the hottest-blooded youth to pollute our sacred Evadzonian blood with their debased strain. Moreover, their country has become amazingly fertile, and is in every respect suitable for colonization.
I will send further details of a general order tomorrow, when we expect to reach their ancient capital of Paralov. I now send the detailed narrative requested for study by the scientific board:
This morning, before penetrating the barrier, I ordered all hands into pressurized air-tight suits, and as an added precaution against contamination with the Twedorski mutation-virus, placed everyone inside the enclosed combat vehicles, personally inspecting the entire expedition to make certain the orders were carried out. My precautions occasioned some slight delay, as it was difficult to handle the bridging equipment under the conditions, and it was nearly noon before we reached the Kuradan side of the stream.
Here, of course, we had to pause while th
e scientific vehicle commanded by Dr. Govelsitz secured samples of the plant life and tested it for the virus. There was no opportunity to obtain samples of animal life immediately, except for some large insects, nearly four merkils in wingspread, which were occupied with the numerous and brilliant flowers of plants which at the same time bore large yellow fruit.
The report of Dr. Govelsitz was that in the hundred years since your gracious grandfather wisely released the Twedorski mutation-virus in Kurada, it had, as expected, bred out of both plants and the large insects, and they were established forms. Dr. Govelsitz’ assistants are engaged in classifying the new forms. They believe the fruit may have economic value.
My own observation was that the forts which formerly occupied the Kuradan side of the stream were ruinous and the metal in them almost completely worn away with rust, which gave indeed a happy augury of the state to which the once-aggressive Kuradans must have declined under the influence of the mutations. At the bases of the cupolas in two of the forts burrowings about two handspans in diameter led downward at an angle through the concrete and metal. I conjectured that this means the development of a mutated burrowing animal of a quiet formidable character, possibly dangerous to human beings, even when protected by armored suits. I have orders for precautions, but no sign of the animals appeared. Dr. Govelsitz considers they may be nocturnal.
As soon as the doctor’s report showed no immediate danger in proceeding, I dispatched combat vehicle XN-54 under Lieutenant Ghenjon to investigate the armored rocket-launchers at Sappuka which gave us so much trouble in the development of our legitimate ambitions a hundred years ago. He has not yet reported, but I expect him to rendezvous with the expedition at Paralov.
The expedition was now ordered to proceed toward Paralov, leaving behind combat vehicle XN-86 to maintain radio contact through the gap in the barrier. The roads are in very poor condition, heavily overgrown with vine-like growths several merkils in thickness. It is recommended that when a colonial expedition is sent, the vehicles be of tread type and include road-building equipment. For at least three philads all the buildings we perceived were in a state of utter decay, and we observed no signs of animal or human life except some small unidentified creatures that disappeared rapidly in the tangle of vines and yellow-fruited plants. Dr. Rab of the linguistic-anthropological unit desires to have placed before the Board his theory that the Evadzon border has become a place of superstitious terror to the modern Kuradans since the erection of the barrier.
