The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  Eliot unfolded it and read it quickly. Then he read it more slowly.

  “Fringillidae sunt,” he quoted, “what kind of crap is that?”

  “The second word is easy,” John Wardell said. “It means ‘they [the winners] are.’ But Fringillidae, wait a minute.”

  He pulled out the third volume of a twenty-volume classical dictionary, thumbed through it for a minute or two, then shook his head.

  “It’s a new word to me. I’ve never seen it.”

  “Then what the hell good is it?”

  “I should have told you, the Oracle uses several languages and she tends to be obscure. You know—‘If King Croesus crosses the river Halys with his army, he will destroy a mighty empire’—which one? Well, as it turned out, his own. He just didn’t read it right.”

  “Don’t worry about me, I can figure it out.”

  “Well, in that case you have no troubles.”

  There was a tinge of unpleasant mockery in Uncle John’s voice, as though he knew something very nasty about Eliot, something the younger man should also sense about himself, something, above all, at which he should bridle if he owned the sensitivity to understand or the touchy sense of personal honor to take offense.

  Then, abruptly, Eliot caught himself. This was advanced senility talking. He wanted money, a life preserver, a hook to fasten into the mountain from which he was falling, and here this crazy and slightly malevolent old bastard was offering him dreams and fantasies.

  “Look, I don’t know how you worked this dime store Cassandra, but if it isn’t too much bother, would you mind telling me how this—this Oracle happened? I mean, what the hell is she? Where did she come from?”

  “You really don’t know?” the old man asked him. “No, I forgot, you wouldn’t, of course. I imagine you majored in business administration, or salesmanship, or art appreciation at that educational cafeteria you attended.”

  Like uncle, like niece, Eliot thought savagely, remembering Julia’s taunts the night before. You’d think I was some kind of a savage because I didn’t go to Harvard. For a moment he was tempted to walk out, but his need and desperation were too great; and, too, for the first time in their association, he told himself he could sense something different from the cold, mocking hostility with which the old man normally treated him, as if Eliot had advanced from the status of outsider to that of bungling, inferior relative, but nonetheless relative. Or perhaps to the status of a large, stupid, clumsy dog with annoying habits, but still not completely outside.

  “The Cumaean Sibyl,” Uncle John went on, “as you would know if you had been given a decent education, was believed to be immortal. Originally, she was a young priestess of Apollo, and the god spoke through her lips when she was in a trance and foretold the future to those who asked. There were half a dozen such priestesses operating, but the one at Cumae took the fancy of the god Apollo and he gave her two presents—the gift of prophecy and immortality. Like any other mortal suitor, he was fatuously in love—but not completely so: when he caught his girl friend out on the grass one night with a local fisherman, he couldn’t take away the gifts he had granted her, but he had wisely held back on giving her eternal youth to go along with immortality. And just to make sure there would be no more young fishermen, he reduced her to the size of a large mouse, shut her up in a box and turned her over to the priests of the temple to use for all eternity.”

  “You believe all this hogwash?”

  Uncle John almost shrugged. There was too much uncertainty in the gesture for it to have been called a definite movement.

  “I don’t know really. There is a story in Livy that the second king of Rome talked with the immortal oracle at Cumae, and that was around 700 B.C. And then a contemporary reference in Petronius seven or eight hundred years after indicates that the same person, or maybe creature, was alive in his day, still functioning. I’ve tried to find out on several occasions, to go beyond the myths, but each time I get a reply that only confuses me more. Maybe she fell from the sky and couldn’t get back. Maybe you’d feel more scientific and rational if I talked in terms of slipping over from another continuum, another frame of illusion, some other . . .”

  “Oh, Christ, cut the crap,” Eliot said under his breath. Then aloud, “What is it inside—a cockroach, a mouse, or what? How do you do the writing trick? Is it like the old money machine?”

  “As long as you don’t open the top and try to find out, and as long as it tells you what will be, what does it matter? If you find it more comforting to believe I’m a trainer of rodents or lice, or am lapsing into senility, then do so. Or if your conception of the universe is too limited to accept a miracle—from Mars or the Moon, or the past or the future, or wherever—then leave it by all means, and we’ll both consider this visit fruitless. All I can tell you is that I bought it a few years ago somewhere between Cumae and the ruins of Pompeii, that I got it cheap, and that I’ve seen it work. ‘La vecchia religione‘—the old religion, the man said, and he wanted a quick sale—probably dug it up illegally.”

  The old kook really believes it, Eliot thought. He found himself looking at the older man with growing disquiet. Not for a moment did he believe that within the doll-house was the Oracle of Pompeii or Cumae or wherever the hell it came from; but the old man seemed convinced of it, and he had learned not to underestimate the old man. Could it be? Had the night suddenly opened like a giant mouth, just beyond his peripheral range of understanding, and belched forth a genuine miracle? He decided to go along with the weird . . .

  “Look,” Eliot said suddenly. “I believe you about the money. You just have the pension and annuity. Otherwise you’re broke; and so am I. But will you sell it to me? I can’t pay now, but if this thing works, I’ll have plenty, I’ve got some angles figured out already. Just put a price on it.”

  “No,” the old man said. “Just take it as a delayed wedding present. You can have it. I know all I want about the future at my age. Like a fool, last year I asked it how long I would live—and it’s not pleasant to know.”

  Uncle John Wardell paused and looked at Eliot with an odd expression. It was a very brief pause and a moment later the old man had resumed his normal controlled and guarded look; but in that transitory second Eliot, impervious as he usually was to other people’s unexpressed feelings, had read the cold despairing hatred of someone who is going to die for someone who is going to live.

  “Go on, take it,” the old man continued. “Just remember to feed the Oracle every night, milk and honey. Don’t open the top of the house. She doesn’t like to be disturbed or looked at. Leave your question at night, but don’t expect an answer until the morning. Don’t try to rush her.”

  “I really appreciate this,” Eliot said.

  “Nothing at all,” the old man replied, smiling oddly. “Don’t thank me yet. You can show yourself out, I imagine.”

  When Eliot got home, he was surprised to find that Julia was rather touched that he had visited Uncle John on his own. She was warm and affectionate, and it was not until late at night that he was able to go quietly out to the car, while she slept, and take the doll-house down to the little plyboard room in the cellar that was his undisturbed private study.

  On Monday he took the slip of paper to the public library and asked for a translation. In the ensuing days he made ten phone calls unavailingly, while the World Series became locked at three games apiece and the bookmakers’ odds fluctuated wildly. Finally, two days after the end of the Series, the slip of paper got to a reference librarian who had majored in zoology as an undergraduate. Fringillidae, Eliot was told, was a genus of birds of which the North American cardinal was among the best known.

  He stood there, scratching his head, two days too late to collect on the victory of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was then that he realized that the predictions of the Oracle were sometimes too obscure to be of value, sometimes too late to profit by.

  In the next weeks he tested the Oracle, each night faithfully putting out the b
owl of milk and honey, each morning, when he had left a question, patiently pulling out the answer. He was becoming satisfied with the tests.

  In late October he asked the Oracle who would win the presidential election and got the answer: filius Johanni victor est. By that time he had invested in a Latin dictionary and had no difficulty in translating the less than elegant Latin (after all, the Oracle was Greek by birth), “The son of John is the victor,” a day or so before he read the headlines, “Johnson Landslide.”

  But he was still cautious. The next week he asked the Oracle whether he should buy Space Industries, Ltd., of Canada, selling at two cents a share. The two words “caveat emptor,” warned him off, so that it was with little surprise that he read the next month that the shares had dropped to nothing and that the officers of the company had been indicted.

  As a last test, he asked the Oracle when John Wardell would die. He was still looking at the reply, “ille fuit,” when the long-distance call for Julia told them that the old man had died that night in his sleep. Poor old boy, Eliot thought as he sat through the interminable funeral services. We had our quarrels, but at the end I guess he was coming around to like me after all. He wanted to do me a favor—at last.

  One of the best clients of the bank, and a man whom Jim Eliot had dealt with for five years, was in the undyed cloth end of the textile business. To hear Max Siegal tell it, it seemed relatively simple: You bought up a lot of undyed cloth—often on credit—you figured what colors would be in fashion in the coming season, then you had your cloth dyed and resold at a profit. But it was a lot more complicated and dangerous than that. If you guessed wrong, you could be left with a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cloth dyed the wrong colors. If that happened, you could hold it, paying storage costs, for years until the colors came in again; you could sell it at a loss; or you could have it redyed and hope to God that the cost of redying wouldn’t put you out of business. Max Siegal had shown an uncanny knack of anticipating the fashionable colors, and the bank had been glad to give him short-term loans, since they had always been repaid before they became due.

  “All right, Max,” Jim Eliot said over the second luncheon martini, “there’ll be no trouble over the loan. You know your credit’s good. By the way, what’s the color this year?”

  “You thinking of taking a flyer, Jim? Forget it, you get paid regularly every two weeks. Bank your money.”

  “It’s just so I can give Julia a little fashion preview.”

  “Well, I’m going forest green, one hundred per cent.”

  That night Eliot asked the Oracle the question and in the morning had the answer, “ex Tyre ad Caesarem.” It was easy enough to read—“from Tyre to Caesar”—but it didn’t make sense to him. He tried the library again, and this time learned in ten minutes that the city of Tyre manufactured a rare purple dye that was reserved for the Roman emperors.

  Jim Eliot handled a few investment accounts, and the best of them was about $500,000 owned by an out-of-town spinster whom he rarely saw, an elderly woman who usually left matters entirely in the hands of the bank provided the returns remained at a level of better than five per cent. At any given time, about a tenth of the estate was in savings accounts waiting to be transferred into a more profitable investment; another tenth was in cash in a safe deposit box, as the old lady insisted. It was the first time for Eliot, and his hands were sweating as he took $10,000 from the safe deposit box.

  With the cash, he bought $10,000 worth of undyed cloth and then arranged with a dyer for thirty days’ credit. When he specified the color—royal purple—the man looked at him as if he wanted to cancel the agreement. But Eliot was beyond fear by now. “Purple,” he said, “royal purple, all of it.”

  It was the next week when Max Siegal called him for lunch.

  “Jim,” he said, “I’m in real trouble. I’ve just seen the advances on Vogue, and this year it’s purple, royal purple, and here I am stuck with forest green.”

  “You want another loan, Max?”

  “It’s too late. By the time I got the cloth dyed, the market would be flooded. Everybody would have switched. The green I could take a loss on and wait for next year; but if I could lay my hands on the purple, I could still break even.”

  “Suppose you could get your hands on about $10,000 worth of cloth that had been dyed royal purple?”

  “I’d pay $25,000 and still make a good profit.”

  The next Monday, Jim Eliot cashed Siegal’s check, paid the dyer, put the $10,000 back in the safe deposit box, beefed up his checking account with the balance. It was enough to pay off the more pressing debts, to retire much of the second mortgage, to pay up the loan at the personal finance company; but at the end of it he was still broke and the bills continued to roll in. One coup wasn’t enough.

  One of the most frequently traded stocks on the market was that of a gold mine in Asia, which fluctuated daily between a dollar and a dollar and a half. It was common knowledge on Wall Street that if ever the price of gold went up there would be a killing. Eliot asked the question of the Oracle and got the answer, this time in English, “The sea will be as full of gold as it is of fishes.” There was something odd about the wording, and he waited. Next week he learned, knocking wood gratefully, of a new process of extracting gold from sea water which caused the price of gold to plummet all over the world.

  He was not in a position where simply avoiding loss was enough. What he needed was a favorable answer, something he could act upon. The bills continued to pour in and the bank account was again down to about a hundred dollars. He was getting sick of obscure answers from the Oracle and answers in foreign languages. He wrote a note demanding clear messages in English. The next morning he got his reply: “Vox dei multas linguas habet [The voice of the god has many tongues].”

  Very funny, Eliot thought; and that night he deliberately neglected the daily feeding. The bowl was put in its place, but he left it empty of milk and honey. He repeated his demand. He burned bay leaves. In the morning there was still no answer. It went on like that for a week. Occasionally, when he put his ear close to the doll-house, he could hear a scurrying around inside, and once, he thought, a small voice crying out. But there was no answer and he realized that something that could live two thousand years could fast for quite a long time.

  Wednesday night was a bad one. He had forgotten to answer a letter from one of his accounts, and the indignant old gentleman had written directly to the president of the bank to complain. When he got home, there was a letter from Michael’s school reminding him that tuition for the year was overdue. Then Julia, very handsome in new gold lamé stretch pants and leopard-skin pullover, looked up from the pitcher of martinis she was stirring, to tell him: that she had signed Pamela up for elocution lessons—“it’s the braces, darling, they make her mumble”—and Charm School sessions; that the washing machine was broken down for good; that the Durkees next door had a new station wagon; that it was about time they got a full-time, live-in maid, even if they had to build a new room on the house; and, finally, that Pongo, the cat, needed a series of vitamin shots.

  Eliot drank five martinis before dinner, and afterwards dozed in a chair. When he awoke, it was past one; Julia was already asleep. He ran cold water on his head and neck. Then he made himself a long scotch and sat thinking. After a while he headed for the cellar, with Pongo, the fat, sullen, castrated tomcat, under his arm, squirming and miaowing.

  It was Julia’s fancy occasionally to walk Pongo on a leash as if he were a dog. On his way to the cellar, Eliot rummaged in a kitchen drawer and found the ornate leash with its twisted silver wire threads, and attached it to the cat’s rhinestone-studded collar. When he got close to the doll-house he tied the end of the leash securely to a pipe. Pongo sat there licking himself lazily.

  Eliot went to the doll-house and reached along one side of the roof for the tiny catch that held it in place, and flipped it open. For a moment he remembered how old Wardell had warned him about looking ins
ide the doll-house. Then he swung the roof over on its hinges. He pointed a standing lamp downward and peered carefully inside. In one of the small rooms off the atrium he could see what looked like a tiny old woman lying on a couch. She was about six inches long, and dressed in a dark robe. She turned her head and stared at Eliot, coldly and viciously.

  He lifted her up, holding her firmly between curved middle finger and the two adjoining ones, as a fisherman holds an eel; but the wriggling was very feeble. Then he brought her close to the cat. For a moment he thought Pongo would break the leash. The cat strained forward, crying horribly with the need to put its teeth into the small, warm creature. Only a few inches separated the two. Eliot could see the frustrated cat’s jaws move and hear the frenzied click-click-click of its teeth. He brought the doll-woman still closer, so close that he could feel the cat’s breath and its sprayed spittle on the back of his hand. The little body held between his fingers was trembling weakly. Then Pongo began to howl. After a moment Eliot put the Oracle back on her couch and closed the roof of the doll-house. He left the message he had been leaving for many nights, but again he left the feeding bowl empty.

  The next morning there was a message for him—“ask and it shall be answered.”

  That night he resumed feeding the Oracle.

  The next day he borrowed $5000 from the same account he had used before, and that night he posed the question. There was no time now to wait for a stock to rise or a business opportunity; he was near bankruptcy; indeed, he would be bankrupt when all the bills came in. All he wanted was three winners; a three-horse parlay. Even if they were all the favorites, he would clear about $100,000, put back what he had borrowed, clean up the debts and be left with capital to use again.

  In the morning the three names were there on the slip of paper. He copied them down carefully into a notebook: Sun-Ray, Snake-killer, and Apollo: first, second, and third races at the local track.