Skander, Planet Aurigae
Dear Pen Pal: You say that while you were waiting for the answer to my last letter you showed the photographic plate to one of the doctors at the hospital—I cannot picture what you mean by doctor or hospital, but let that pass—and he took the problem up with government authorities. Problem? I don't understand. I thought we were having a pleasant correspondence, private and personal.
I shall certainly appreciate your sending that picture of yourself.
Skander, Aurigae II
Dear Pen Pal: I assure you I am not annoyed at your action. It merely puzzled me, and I am sorry the plate has not yet been given back to you. Knowing what governments are, I can imagine that it will not be returned to you for some time, so I am taking the liberty of inclosing another plate.
I cannot imagine why you should have been warned against continuing this correspondence. What do they expect me to do?—eat you up at long distance. I'm sorry but I don't like hydrogen in my diet.
In any event, I would like your picture as a memento of our friendship, and I will send you mine as soon as I have received yours. You may keep it or throw it away, or give it to your governmental authorities—but at least I will have the knowledge that I've given a fair exchange.
With all best wishes,
Skander, Aurigae II
Dear Pen Pal: Your last letter was so long in coming that I thought you had decided to break off the correspondence. I was sorry to notice that you failed to inclose the photograph, puzzled by your reference to having had a relapse, and cheered by your statement that you would send it along as soon as you felt better—whatever that means. However, the important thing is that you did write, and I respect the philosophy of your club which asks its members not to write of pessimistic matters. We all have our own problems which we regard as overshadowing the problems of others. Here I am in prison, doomed to spend the next thirty years tucked away from the main stream of life. Even the thought is hard on my restless spirit, though I know I have a long life ahead of me after my release.
In spite of your friendly letter, I won't feel that you have completely re-established contact with me until you send me the photograph.
Skander, Aurigae II
Dear Pen Pal: The photograph arrived. As you suggest, your appearance startled me. From your description I thought I had mentally reconstructed your body. It just goes to show that words cannot really describe an object which one has never seen.
You'll notice that I've inclosed a photograph of myself, as I promised I would. Chunky, metallic-looking chap, am I not, very different, I'll wager, than you expected? The various races with whom we have communicated become wary of us when they discover we are highly radioactive, and that literally we are a radioactive form of life, the only such (that we know of) in the universe. It's been very trying to be so isolated and, as you know, I have occasionally mentioned that I had hopes of escaping not only the deadly imprisonment to which I am being subjected but also the body which cannot escape.
Perhaps you'll be interested in hearing how far this idea has developed. The problem involved is one of exchange of personalities with someone else. Actually, it is not really an exchange in the accepted meaning of the word. It is necessary to get an impress of both individuals, of their minds and of their thoughts as well as their bodies. Since this phase is purely mechanical, it is simply a matter of taking complete photographs and of exchanging them. By complete I mean, of course, every vibration must be registered. The next step is to make sure the two photographs are exchanged, that is, that each party has somewhere near him a complete photograph of the other. (It is already too late, Pen Pal. I have in motion the sub-space energy interflow between the two plates, so you might as well read on.) As I have said it is not exactly an exchange of personalities. The original personality in each individual is suppressed, literally pushed back out of the consciousness, and the image personality from the "photographic" plate replaces it.
You will take with you a complete memory of your life on Earth, and I will take along memory of my life on Aurigae. Simultaneously, the memory of the receiving body will be blurrily at our disposal. A part of us will always be pushing up, striving to regain consciousness, but always lacking the strength to succeed.
As soon as I grow tired of Earth, I will exchange bodies in the same way with a member of some other race. Thirty years hence, I will be ready to reclaim my body, and you can then have whatever body I last happened to occupy.
This should be a very happy arrangement for us both. You with your short life expectancy will have outlived all your contemporaries and will have had an interesting experience. I admit I expect to have the better of the exchange —but now, enough of explanation. By the time you reach this part of the letter it will be me reading it, not you. But if any part of you is still aware, so long for now, Pen Pal. R's been nice having all those letters from you. I shall write you from time to time to let you know how things are going with my tour.
Ever yours,
Skander, Aurigae II
Dear Pen Pal: Thanks a lot for forcing the issue. For a long time I hesitated about letting you play such a trick on yourself. You see, the government scientists analyzed the nature of that first photographic plate you sent me, and so the final decision was really up to me. I decided that anyone as eager as you were to put one over should be allowed to succeed.
Now I know I didn't have to feel sorry for you. Your plan to conquer Earth wouldn't have gotten anywhere, but the fact that you had the idea ends the need for sympathy.
By this time you will have realized for yourself that a man who has been paralyzed since birth, and is subject to heart attacks, cannot expect a long life span. I am happy to tell you that your once lonely pen pal is enjoying himself, and I am happy to sign myself with a name to which I expect to become accustomed.
Skander, Aurigae II
He said he had blue hair and blond eyes. But it was hard to prove, because he happened to be invisible
LOVE IN THE DARK
By H. L. Gold
Being Livy Random wasn't easy. It meant having a face a little too long, a figure a little too plump, brown hair brushed and brushed yet always uncurling at the ends. It meant not being able to make herself more than passably attractive. Worse than that, being Livy Random meant being Mrs. Mark Random, the wile of that smug lump asleep in the oilier bed.
Mark wasn't snoring; he was too neat for that. He was always making even stacks of things, or putting them in alphabetical order on shelves, or straightening rugs and pictures, or breathing neatly in the other bed.
Livy closed the bedroom door with a bang. Mark didn’t stir; he could (all asleep in one infuriating minute, and wake up, eight hours later to the second, in exactly the same unlovely position and disposition. Her high-heeled shoes didn’t bother him when she kicked them off, and neither did scraping the chair back against the wall—he hated chair marks on walls—when she sat down to take oil her stockings. And Livy Random wanted, venomously, to bother her husband.
Mark Random had married her because he had been made sales manager of the electric battery factory, and he'd had enough of eating in restaurants while he had been a traveling salesman. Besides, it looked better for a man in his position to be married. Livy had accepted him because she was past thirty and nobody else might ask her: besides, she needed someone to support her. So she cooked for him. She cleaned for him. She even tried to keep a budget for him, though that was his idea. lie gave her a meager household allowance anti nothing else.
Nothing, in this case, must be understood as the complete and humiliating absence of everything. When Livy was particularly incensed about her marriage, which was generally, it was some comfort to know that she could have it easily annulled. And Mark couldn't do a thing to stop her. He hadn’t, at least, and there was no sign that he intended to, cared to, or even thought of it.
Pulling her slip over her head, Livy wondered about this. She had heard, at least as often as any othe
r girl, that all men were beasts. Mark was, of course, a beast in a way—in his special, primly exasperating way. But he wasn't a beast in the usual sense. With Livy, anyway. Maybe some woman in a back street hovel thought he was. But that wasn't likely; he would have wedded the lady and saved the cost of this apartment.
What was wrong with Mark? It wasn’t Livy, because she had known her duty and had been grimly prepared for it, though God knew this tall and pudgy person inspired nothing at all in her.
"Short and pudgy," she thought, reaching around back for the snaps. "Why doesn't somebody put snaps in front where they belong, and where a body can get at them, and make a fortune? Short and pudgy Is bad enough, but Mark’s got to be loll and pudgy, with a stomach that pulls his shoulders down and caves in his chest. And those black-rimmed glasses—some oculist must have been •tuck with them for yean. That hair of his—thick, oily, wavy and yellow. Like butter starting to melt—"
She looked at him again. What had made her think that marrying him was better than not being married at all? She could have got at least a housekeeper's job somewhere. With the possibility that some man in the household would fall in love with her.
Livy stopped. She crossed her arms over her breasts. It was the oddest sensation.
Somebody was staring at her as she undressed.
Mark? It didn't seem possible, but she held her slip in front of her and flipped the switch and looked. He was on his side, one arm under his head, and his back was to her. He never looked at her in the light, so why should he stare at her in the dark?
Livy peered under the window shades. They reached the sills; nobody could see beneath them or around them. She felt like a fool bending to glance under the beds, poking warily among the dresses and suits in the closets, and searching behind the furniture.
The light aroused Mark; that was something. He twisted around to face her blurrily.
''What's the matter?" he asked, his thin voice fuzzily peevish.
"Somebody was watching me undress," she said.
"Mere?”
She tightened her lips. "I haven’t undressed in the street in years," she said. "Of course it was here!"
"You mean somebody's in the room with us?" He reached out for his glasses on the night table. "I don't see anyone.”
"I know," she said flatly. "I searched the place. It's empty. Or it might as well be."
He stared at her. He wasn’t, of course, looking below her face, though she still had her slip clutched in front of her. He was staring at her face as if she had a smudge on it.
"Do you often have these ideas?" he asked.
“Co on back to sleep." she said. "If you want to act like a psychiatrist, your own case would keep you busy
He was still looking at her face, so she turned off the light. She held the slip until she heard him turn heavily, then grunt as he spread himself in the same position as before.
Livy hung up her slip and began peeling off her girdle. There it was again—hungry eyes peering out of the dark, touching her body with ocular caresses.
It wasn't imagination. It couldn't be. She'd been mentally undressed as often as any other not too attractive girl, and she knew the shrinking, exposed feeling too well to mistake it.
No use turning on the light again. She wouldn't find anyone in the room.
"Let's be reasonable,” she thought, fighting an urge to leap into bed and scream. Tm tired. Pooped, if you want to know. That dreary little Mrs. Hall made a hash out of the bridge game. Why do I always draw town idiots as partners? Is it some curse that was put on my family back in the Middle Ages? That's all I need; it's not enough playing house with this inspecting officer searching for dust under the furniture.
"All right. I'm exhausted and jumpy. I'm normal, or what passes for normal. If anybody mentions Freud to me. I'll start swinging this girdle like a night stick. I'm not losing my mind. I’m not having a wish-fulfillment either, if that's what you're thinking. Livy dear, it's just time I went to bed—and don't go twisting that statement around."
Her eyes did ache a bit: all that smoke. Maybe she should cut out cigarettes. Aching eyes could make you see things that weren't there. This wasn't exactly seeing, but maybe it was connected somehow.
Livy dosed her eyes experimentally, and the effect was more startling than the skin sensation.
In the dark, with her eyes shut, she could see who was staring at her. It gave her a shock until she realized that she could imagine it, rather; she couldn't sec unless her eyes were open, could she? She tried it, and the image disappeared. She closed them again and there it was.
As long as it was her imagination, she studied the imaginary owner ot the imaginary eyes. She stared at him just as intently as she imagined he was staring at her.
"Stunning,” was her first verdict, and then, "What a build! I must have been peering unconsciously at those physical culture magazines on the newsstands. That long blue hair and those wide blond eyes and a cute little straight nose—I always did low a man with a cleft in his chin! Heavens, did you ever see such muscles? And— wait a minute!”
She opened her eyes quickly. A girl had to have some modesty, even if her imagination didn't. And then something jarred her sense of logic.
Long blue hair and wide blond eyes? It must have been a twist of her subvocal tongue: She meant long blond hair and wide blue eyes. Of course.
She dosed her eyes and rechecked. The hair was blue and the eyes were blond, or close enough to it. That wasn't all, either. It wasn't really hair. It was feathers. Long, very fine, like bird-of-paradise plumage; but feathers. As long as they were sort of combed flat, she could never have guessed. But her stunning imaginary man frowned as she stared at him, and the frown lifted his— well, feathers, into an attractive crest. Very attractive, in fact. She liked the effect much better than hair. . . .
Peculiar. The dazzling creature was blushing under her stare, and turning his head away shyly. Was it possible to blush a beautiful shocking pink? And to have pointed leprechaun ears much handsomer than the regular male clam-shell variety? And since when does a mental image turn bashful?
"Who cares?" thought Livy. “You’re a gorgeous thing, and any psychiatrist cures me of this particular delusion over my dead body! Now go away or I won't get a wink of sleep all night.”
With her eyes shut, she saw the unearthly vision walk dutifully toward the bedroom door, open it and close it behind him.
"That you, Livy?” asked Mark from his bed.
"Is what me?”
"Opening the door."
“I haven't budged from this spot.”
She heard him roll over and sit up again. “I’m a practical man with both feet on the ground," he said. “I don’t hear things unless there's something to hear. And I heard the door open and close.”
Livy pulled on her nightgown over her head—warm, thick flannel because texture and sheerness didn’t matter. "All right, you heard the door open and close,” she said, falling back luxuriously on her soft mattress and dragging the heavy blankets up. "You can’t get me to argue with you this lime of the night.”
"Something's wrong with you," said Mark. "We'll find out what it is tomorrow."
As far as she was concerned, there was nothing whatever wrong with her. Why shouldn't an unhappy woman imagine a handsome, thrilling man admiring her? Maybe there was some hidden and sinister significance in the blue plumage and pointed ears, but she didn't care to know about it
She knew Mark wouldn't risk one of her tempers by waking her up to talk, so she firmly pretended to be sleeping while he dressed, made his own breakfast, and drove away. Then she got out of bed and took off the nightgown.
Sure enough, her flesh shrank. She felt as if she were being spied on.
“Look," she said testily to her subconscious, or libido, or whatever the term was, "not the first thing in the morning. Let me at least brush my teeth and have some of that black mud Mark calls coffee.”
Anyway, it was ridiculous, right in broad day
light Phantasms are for the dark. Any decent neurosis ought to know that.
Nevertheless, Livy closed her eyes to test her memory. The exciting dreamboat with the blue plumage, blond eyes and gay ears was exactly the same—staring hungrily at her from somewhere near the vanity. Certainly she saw the vanity; she knew it was there, didn't she? She tried staring back, to see if her imaginary lover boy would blush and turn away again. He didn’t, which probably meant that some quirk in her mind had grown bolder, for he grinned becomingly and his blond eyes smiled up and down her body.
“I never would have believed it," she muttered moodily, opening her eyes and proceeding to dress. "Rainy evenings I can understand, but I usually feel so nasty in the morning."
She was washing the dishes after breakfast when she felt the first physical symptoms of her delusion. It was a light, airy kits on the back of her neck. Goosebumps bloomed, her spine went sirupy, her knees came tin—
She swiftly disposed of the thrill by blaming it on a loose end of hair. But she cautiously pinned her thatch all up undo a kerchief; another few ethereal kisses there, whether uncurled hair or psychological, and she would climb the wall.
Next time she felt the kiss, it started at her neck and worked down to her shoulder, six distinct and passionate touches of warm, hard lips. Weakly she realized that her hair was still tightly bound and pinned up, and dial left only one conclusion to be drawn.
"All right," she said, dizzily happy, "I'm going nutty. Wonder why I never thought of it before."
There were more kisses during (he day, enough to keep her glowing. Hallucinations, of course, but wonderful ones, and she resolved to hang grimly onto them. So she left Mark his dinner and a note, and then went
In the theater, peculiarly, she felt more alone than she had at home. The picture was nothing to rave about, but she saw it three limes to make sure Mark would be in bed when she returned.
Beyond the End of Time (1952) Anthology Page 27
