The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  "Johnny, I honestly do think he ought to be under a doctor's care. He didn't look at all well that day. Are you sure—"

  "Of course I'm sure! What do you take me for? As a matter of fact, he is under a doctor's care. Norman's just feeble-minded. I've told you that a dozen times, Veronica. I wish you'd take my word for it. He ... he sees a doctor regularly. It was just having you there that upset him. Strangers throw him off his balance. He's fine now. Let's forget about Norman. We were talking about getting married, remember?"

  "You were. Not me. No, Johnny, I'm afraid it wouldn't work." She looked at him in the soft light, her face clouded with doubt and—was it suspicion? With a woman of Veronica's mentality, you never knew just where you stood. Fowler could reason her out of every objection she offered to him, but because reason meant so little to her, the solid substratum of her convictions remained unchanged.

  "You'll marry me," he said, his voice confident.

  "No." She gave him an uneasy look and then drew a deep breath and said: "You may as well know this now, Johnny—I've just about decided to marry somebody else."

  "Who?" He wanted to shout the question, but he forced himself to be calm.

  "No one you know. Ray Barnaby. I ... I've pretty well made up my mind about it, John."

  "I don't know the man," Fowler told her evenly, "but I'll make it my business to find out all I can."

  "Now John, let's not quarrel. I—"

  "You're going to marry me or nobody, Veronica." Fowler was astonished at the sudden violence of his own reaction. "Do you understand that?"

  "Don't be silly, John. You don't own me."

  "I'm not being silly! I'm just telling you."

  "John, I'll do exactly as I please. Now, let's not quarrel about it."

  Until now, until this moment of icy rage, he had never quite realized what an obsession Veronica had become. Fowler had got out of the habit of being thwarted. His absolute power over one individual and one unchanging situation was giving him a taste for tyranny. He sat looking at Veronica in the pink dimness of the booth, grinding his teeth together in an effort not to shout at her.

  "If you go through with this, Veronica, I'll make it my business to see you regret it as long as you live," he told her in a harsh, low voice.

  She pushed her half-emptied glass aside with sudden violence that matched his. "Don't get me started, John Fowler!" she said angrily. "I've got a temper, too! I've always known there was something I didn't like about you."

  "There'll be a lot more you don't like if you—"

  "That's enough, John!" She got up abruptly, clutching at her slipping handbag. Even in this soft light he could see the sudden hardening of her face, the lines of anger pinching downward along her nose and mouth. A perverse triumph filled him because at this moment she was ugly in her rage, but it did not swerve his determination.

  "You're going to marry me," he told her harshly. "Sit down. You're going to marry me if I have to—" He paused.

  "To what?" Her voice was goading. He shook his head. He couldn't finish the threat aloud.

  Norman will help me, he was thinking in cold triumph. Norman will find a way.

  He smiled thinly after her as she stalked in a fury out of the bar.

  -

  For a week Fowler heard no more from her. He made inquiries about the man Barnaby and was not surprised to learn that Veronica's intended—if she had really been serious about the fellow, after all—was a young broker of adequate income and average stupidity. A nonentity. Fowler told himself savagely that they were two of a kind and no doubt deserved each other. But his obsession still ruled him, and he was determined that no one but himself should marry Veronica.

  Short of hypnosis, there seemed no immediate way to change her mind. But perhaps he could change Barnaby's. He believed he could, given enough time. Norman was at work on a rather ingenious little device involving the use of a trick lighting system. Fowler had been impressed, on consideration, by the effect of the rosy light in the bar on Veronica's appearance.

  Another week passed, with no news about Veronica. Fowler told himself he could afford to remain aloof. He had the means to control her very nearly within his grasp. He would watch her, and wait his time in patience.

  He was very busy, too, with other things. Two more devices were ready for patenting—the Magic Latch keyed to fingerprint patterns, and the Haircut Helmet that could be set for any sort of hair trimming and would probably wreak havoc among barbers. But litigation on the Hed-D-Acher was threatening to be expensive, and Fowler had learned already to live beyond his means. Far beyond. It seemed ridiculous to spend only what he took in each day, when such fortunes in royalties were just around the corner.

  Twice he had to take Norman off the lighting device to perform small tasks in other directions. And Norman was in himself a problem.

  The work exhausted him. It had to exhaust him. That was necessary. An unpleasant necessity, of course, but there it was. Sometimes the exhaustion in Norman's eyes made one uncomfortable. Certainly Norman suffered. But because he was seldom able to show it plainly, Fowler could tell himself that perhaps he imagined the worst part of it. Casuistry, used to good purpose, helped him to ignore what he preferred not to see.

  -

  By the end of the second week, Fowler decided not to wait on Veronica any longer. He bought a dazzling solitaire diamond whose cost faintly alarmed even himself, and a wedding band that was a full circle of emerald-cut diamonds to complement it. With ten thousand dollars worth of jewelry in his pocket, he went into the city to pay her a call.

  Barnaby answered the door.

  Stupidly Fowler heard himself saying: "Miss Wood here?"

  Barnaby, grinning, shook his head and started to answer. Fowler knew perfectly well what he was about to say. The fatuous grin would have told him even if some accurate sixth sense had not already made it clear. But he wouldn't let Barnaby say it. He thrust the startled bridegroom aside and shouldered angrily into the apartment, calling: "Veronica! Veronica, where are you?"

  She came out of the kitchen in a ruffled apron, apprehension and defiance on her face.

  "You can just get right out of here, John Fowler," she said firmly. Barnaby came up from behind him and began a blustering remonstrance, but she slipped past Fowler and linked her arm with Barnaby's, quieting him with a touch.

  "We were married day before yesterday, John," she said.

  Fowler was astonished to discover that the cliché about a red swimming haze of rage was perfectly true. The room and the bridal couple shimmered before him for an instant. He could hardly breathe in the suffocating fury that swam in his brain.

  He took out the white velvet box, snapped it open and waved it under Veronica's nose. Liquid fire quivered in the myriad cut surfaces of the jewels and for an instant pure greed made Veronica's face as hard as the diamonds.

  Barnaby said: "I think you'd better go, Fowler."

  In silence, Fowler went.

  -

  The little light-device wouldn't do now. He would need something more powerful for his revenge. Norman put the completed gadget aside and began to work on something new. There would be a use for the thing later. Already plans were spinning themselves out in Fowler's mind.

  They would be expensive plans. Fowler took council with himself and decided that the moment had come to put the magic window on the market.

  Until now he had held this in reserve. Perhaps he had even been a little afraid of possible repercussions. He was artist enough to know that a whole new art-form might result from a practical telepathic projector. There were so many possibilities—

  But the magic window failed.

  Not wholly, of course. It was a miracle, and men always will buy miracles. But it wasn't the instant, overwhelming financial success Fowler had felt certain it would be. For one thing, perhaps this was too much of a miracle. Inventions can't become popular until the culture is ready for them. Talking films were made in Paris by Méliès around 1890, but
perhaps because that was a double miracle, nobody took to the idea. As for a telepathic screen—

  It was a specialized luxury item. And it wasn’t as easy or as safe to enjoy as one might suppose. For one thing, few minds turned out to be disciplined enough to maintain a picture they deliberately set out to evoke. As a mass entertaining medium it suffered from the same faults as family motion pictures—other peoples' memories and dreams are notoriously boring unless one sees oneself in them.

  Besides, this was too close to pure telepathy to be safe. Fowler had lived alone too long to remember the perils of exposing one's thoughts to a group. Whatever he wanted to project on his private window, he projected. But in the average family it wouldn't do. It simply wouldn't do.

  Some Hollywood companies and some millionaires leased windows—Fowler refused to sell them outright. A film studio photographed a batch of projected ideations and cut them into a dream sequence for a modern Cinderella story. But trick photography had already done work so similar that it made no sensation whatever. Even Disney had done some of the stuff better. Until trained imaginative projective artists could be developed, the windows were simply not going to be a commercial success.

  One ethnological group tried to use a window to project the memories of oldsters in an attempt to recapture everyday living customs of the recent past, but the results were blurred and inaccurate, full of anachronisms. They all had to be winnowed and checked so completely that little of value remained. The fact stood out that the ordinary mind is too undisciplined to be worth anything as a projector. Except as a toy, the window was useless.

  It was useless commercially. But for Fowler it had one intrinsic usefulness more valuable than money—

  One of the wedding presents Veronica and Barnaby received was a telepathic window. It came anonymously. Their suspicions should have been roused. Perhaps they were, but they kept the window. After all, in her modeling work Veronica had met many wealthy people, and Barnaby also had moneyed friends, any of whom might in a generous mood have taken a window-lease for them as a goodwill gesture. Also, possession of a magic window was a social distinction. They did not allow themselves to look the gift-horse too closely in the mouth. They kept the window.

  They could not have known—though they might have guessed—that this was a rather special sort of window. Norman had been at work on it through long, exhausting hours, while Fowler stood over him with the goading repetitious commands that kept him at his labor.

  -

  Fowler was not too disappointed at the commercial failure of the thing. There were other ways of making money. So long as Norman remained his to command the natural laws of supply and demand did not really affect him. He had by now almost entirely ceased to think in terms of the conventional mores. Why should he? They no longer applied to him. His supply of money and resources was limitless. He never really had to suffer for a failure. It would always be Norman, not Fowler, who suffered.

  There was unfortunately no immediate way in which he could check how well his magic window was working. To do that you would have to be an invisible third person in the honeymoon apartment. But Fowler, knowing Veronica as he did, could guess.

  The window was based on the principle that if you give a child a jackknife he'll probably cut himself.

  Fowler's first thought had been to create a window on which he could project his own thoughts, disguised as those of the bride or groom. But he had realized almost immediately that a far more dangerous tool lay ready-made in the minds of the two whose marriage he meant to undermine.

  "It isn't as if they wouldn't break up anyhow, in a year or two," he told himself as he speculated on the possibilities of his magic window. He was not justifying his intent. He didn't need to, any more. He was simply considering possibilities. "They're both stupid, they're both selfish. They're not material you could make a good marriage of. This ought to be almost too easy—"

  Every man, he reasoned, has a lawless devil in his head. What filters through the censor-band from the unconscious mind is controllable. But the lower levels of the brain are utterly without morals.

  Norman produced a telepathic window that would at times project images from the unconscious mind.

  It was remotely controlled, of course; most of the time it operated on the usual principles of the magic window. But whenever Fowler chose he could throw a switch that made the glass twenty miles away hypersensitive.

  Before he threw it for the first time, he televised Veronica. It was evening. When the picture dawned in the television screen he could see the magic window set up in its elegant frame within range of the televisor, so that everyone who called might be aware of the Barnaby's distinction.

  Luckily it was Veronica who answered, though Barnaby was visible in the background, turning toward the 'visor an interested glance that darkened when Fowler's face dawned upon the screen. Veronica's politely expectant look turned sullen as she recognized the caller.

  "Well?"

  Fowler grinned. "Oh, nothing. Just wondered how you were getting along."

  "Beautifully, thanks. Is that all?"

  Fowler shrugged. "If that's the way you feel, yes."

  "Good-by," Veronica said firmly, and flicked the switch. The screen before Fowler went blank. He grinned. All he had wanted to do was remind her of himself. He touched the stud that would activate that magic window he had just seen, and settled down to wait.

  What would happen now he didn't know. Something would. He hoped the sight of him had reminded Veronica of the dazzling jewelry he had carried when they last met. He hoped that upon the window now would be dawning a covetous image of those diamonds, clear as dark water and quivering with fiery light. The sight should be enough to rouse resentment in Barnaby's mind, and when two people quarrel wholeheartedly, there are impulses toward mayhem in even the most civilized mind. It should shock the bride and groom to see on a window that reflected their innermost thoughts a picture of hatred and wishful violence. Would Veronica see herself being strangled in effigy in the big wall-frame? Would Barnaby see himself bleeding from the deep scratches his bride would be yearning to score across his face?

  Fowler sat back comfortably, luxuriating in speculation.

  It might take a long time. It might take years. He was willing to wait.

  -

  It took even longer than Fowler had expected. Slowly the poison built up in the Barnaby household, very slowly. And in that time a different sort of toxicity developed in Fowler's. He scarcely realized it. He was too close.

  He never recognized the moment when his emotional balance shifted and he began actively to hate Norman.

  The owner of the golden goose must have lived under considerable strain. Every day when he went out to look in the nest he must have felt a quaking wonder whether this time the egg would be white, and valuable only for omelets or hatching. Also, he must have had to stay very close to home, living daily with the nightmare of losing his treasure—

  Norman was a prisoner—but a prisoner handcuffed to his jailer. Both men were chained. If Fowler left him alone for too long, Norman might recover. It was the inevitable menace that made travel impossible. Fowler could keep no servants; he lived alone with his prisoner. Occasionally he thought of Norman as a venomous snake whose poison fangs had to be removed each time they were renewed. He dared not cut out the poison sacs themselves, for there was no way to do that without killing the golden goose. The mixed metaphors were indicative of the state of Fowler's mind by then.

  And he was almost as much a prisoner in the house as Norman was.

  Constantly now he had to set Norman problems to solve simply as a safety measure, whether or not they had commercial value. For Norman was slowly regaining his strength. He was never completely coherent, but he could talk a little more, and he managed to put across quite definitely his tremendous urge to give Fowler certain obscure information.

  Fowler knew, of course, what it probably was. The cure. And Norman seemed to have a strangely touchin
g confidence that if he could only frame his message intelligibly, Fowler would make arrangements for the mysterious cure.

  Once Fowler might have been touched by the confidence. Not now. Because he was exploiting Norman so ruthlessly, he had to hate either Norman or himself. By a familiar process he was projecting his own fault upon his prisoner and punishing Norman for it. He no longer speculated upon Norman's mysterious origin or the source of his equally mysterious powers. There was obviously something in that clouded mind that gave forth flashes of a certain peculiar genius. Fowler accepted the fact and used it.

  There was probably some set of rules that would govern what Norman could and could not do, but Fowler did not discover—until it was too late—what the rules were. Norman could produce inconceivably intricate successes, and then fail dismally at the simplest tasks.

  Curiously, he turned out to be an almost infallible finder of lost articles, so long as they were lost in the confines of the house. Fowler discovered this by accident, and was gratified to learn that for some reason that kind of search was the most exhausting task he could set for his prisoner. When all else failed, and Norman still seemed too coherent or too strong for safekeeping, Fowler had only to remember that he had misplaced his wristwatch or a book or screwdriver, and to send Norman after it.

  Then something very odd happened, and after that he stopped the practice, feeling bewildered and insecure. He had ordered Norman to find a lost folder of rather important papers. Norman had gone into his own room and closed the door. He was missing for a long time. Eventually Fowler's impatience built up enough to make him call off the search, and he shouted to Norman to come out.

  There was no answer. When he had called a third time in vain, Fowler opened the door and looked in. The room was empty. There were no windows. The door was the only exit, and Fowler could have sworn Norman had not come out of it.

  In a rising panic he ransacked the room, calling futilely. He went through the rest of the house in a fury of haste and growing terror. Norman was not in the kitchen or the living room or the cellar or anywhere in sight outside.