PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE by John Brunner

by Players At The Game Of People (v5. 5) (html)

  Not waiting for a reply, Hamish spun on his heel, almost tripping over his own feet in his hurry, and strode back the way they had come. A few incurious strollers noticed but paid no attention.

  Godwin halted, staring. He thought of calling out, but it seemed pointless. Hamish had always been a strange and unpredictable person; perhaps he had been struck by a crucial idea which he felt he must act on instantly. One riddle having been solved, there must be another, or he would grow bored with his mere existence, as witness the lengths he went to to invent problems for himself.

  When he had gone twenty or thirty paces, though, he looked distractedly from side to side as though intending to cross the road from the pond side to the East Heath, and wanting to check for oncoming traffic. There was some—a couple of motorbikes roaring up from the direction of the Bull and Bush and a group of three cars approaching more slowly from Central Hampstead.

  Instead of waiting, he disregarded their presence and walked into the middle of the road, where he began to twitch and jerk and fidget and mouth nonsense, his eyeballs rolling upward in their sockets. Like a marionette controlled by a crazy puppet-master he shook and swayed and jumped up and down and beat his face with his fists until blood began to run from one corner of his mouth, after which he raised his arms higher and started to rip his hair out by handfuls. All the time his lips were moving in soundless curses. Shortly he wet himself; by then, most of his hair was gone, leaving huge raw patches on his scalp, and he turned to clawing at his forehead first, then his eyes.

  Before anybody reached him among the few onlookers who were not too frightened to interfere, he had gouged both eyeballs out and with horrific and appalling strength he had torn open the sides of his throat so that his Adam’s apple fell forward in a gush of blood and he tumbled to the roadway and was dead.

  Godwin could do nothing to help. He stood so completely paralyzed by the pangs of punishment that he could not even shut his eyes and escape the sight of what was happening.

  Police appeared from everywhere, at least twenty of them, some running up the steep slopes of the Heath, some emerging from dark green hedges behind the pond, some seeming to materialize from thin air. Godwin still stood helpless. He was not the only person, though, who to outward view had simply been transfixed by shock. Half a dozen mostly elderly folk nearby were crying and having to lean on each other for support, while the children who had been playing in the pond were being whisked away, screaming.

  That was what had been most horrible of all: the fact that Hamish had not uttered a sound while he was destroying himself.

  Or, to put it another way: being whipped to death.

  At long, long last Godwin was able to move stiltedly away and return to his car. Carefully, slowly, thinking about every single movement, he drove home, half certain of what he was going to find when he got there, and likewise half eager and half terrified.

  As he approached his home street he thought his sight was being blurred by tears, but it was rain once more; people were ducking into shelter to avoid it, a mere drizzle thus far but portending heavier downpours later on. By the time he left the car in the garage and made for home it was coming down in steady rod like streaks, warm but harsh.

  And there, standing in the same porch way on the other side of the road, was the woman. He had somehow known (but if she had not been there he would have forgotten his premonition—of course, and as usual) and was anyhow prepared.

  She was wearing old jeans and a grubby brown jacket and a plastic snood that failed to cover her hair. Her face was the face: the one which had haunted too many of his dreams since he won his George Medal. Until this moment, he had been able to forget in his waking hours just how many such there had been. It was aged to correspond with what Hamish had told him.

  But nothing fitted! Nothing, nothing! He could not have gone back to a past reality! If she was fifty now, she could not have been ten during the Blitz!

  Poised to enter his home, he checked. She was approaching, glancing up at the rain much as Hamish had glanced left and right as though to avoid oncoming vehicles—stop it! She was proffering something for him to look at, and waving. He waited under the porch of his home with a sense of foreboding. The downpour redoubled just as she arrived on his side of the road, soaking her from head to foot. But she paid no heed. She flourished before him a scrap of newspaper in a transparent plastic envelope.

  And said something, drowned out as a boy on a noisy motorbike roared along the street, attracting all the attention of all the kids who had been, as usual, turned out of their houses to fend for themselves, to go to school or not as they chose, their parents having given up caring.

  “What?”

  “I said”—shouting now—“I want to know who the hell you think you are!”

  “Why?”

  “You can’t be him! You can’t!” She was staring at him with huge sad eyes, rain dripping from the rat-tails of her blond locks. “But you look so like—! And where the hell is my daughter?”

  She clutched his arm; he shook her off, turning away. “I think you must be out of your mind—madam!” he said cuttingly, and resolved that if she persisted, he would invoke the flex. Probably he should already have done so.

  “Explain this, then!” she shouted, thrusting the plastic-clad press cutting under his nose. “Go on! Explain!”

  “Get lost, you maniac!” Godwin barked. And had to dodge, at risk of losing his footing on the worn steps, as she shot her right arm out toward him. But she was not intending to hit him, only to catch hold and make him look at what she was clutching.

  “It’s your face!” she cried. “And it’s impossible—it can’t be true! But—oh, damn you, why can’t you understand? It is your face!”

  All of a sudden, despite the rain smears on the clear plastic, Godwin recognized a pattern on the paper: to the left, a column of text, to the right, a series of four photographs, a headline spanning both.

  And the world seemed to come to a petrified halt.

  At long last he said, hearing his voice gravelly and rough, “Where did you get that?”

  “I’ve kept it all my life. Do you recognize it?”

  “You think”—he was calming now—“one of those photos is of me?”

  “No, of course not. It’s of somebody exactly like you called Flight Lieutenant Ransome who rescued me from my parents’ home when a flying bomb landed on it in 1944. But I’ve not only carried this with me ever since. I’ve carried the clearest possible memory of the face of the man who rescued me. I’ve been in love with it—not with him, with it. I can scarcely bear to look at you because you wear the face I remember. But I must. I have to, because so far as I can find out you were the last person to see my daughter alive.”

  She dropped her hands to her sides and stood before him, a foot lower on the steps of the house, with rain pelting down on her head, like a penitent at the shrine of some strict but not unkindly water god.

  “Alive?” Godwin said after a while.

  “They think she must either have been murdered and very well hidden, or kidnapped out of the country. There’s a big demand for European girls in the Arab countries, and—so they tell me—the wealthy men out there are now too sophisticated to worry about whether or not they’re virgins. Just so long as they’re good at what becomes their job… But I know Dora. I know she’s never been a person to obey—me, or anybody. So I think it’s far more likely that she’s dead.”

  There was a dead pause, during which the noise of the motorbike finally faded into silence and Godwin compared—point for point—these features with his recollection of the little girl he had known as Greer.

  He had not been mistaken. Barring the effects of age, the correspondence was flawless.

  All at once an indescribable hunger filled him: a hunger for knowledge. How was this possible? Why? How could that press cutting match the one he owned so closely? How could this woman have recognized his face when it didn’t belong to any Flight Lieutenant R
ansome…?

  Or did it?

  The notion that his very face might have been stolen was so horrifying that it tipped the balance, persuaded him to do something he had never dreamed of doing before. But he needed information as badly as though he were starved in some manner abstract yet essential—as though there could be a vitamin deficiency of the mind.

  He had believed until now that he knew who he was. He had believed he knew who others thought he was. On the instant all these comfortable assumptions had been wiped away.

  He said gruffly, “No, Barbara. Your daughter isn’t dead.”

  “You know who I am?” She flinched away as though she had been struck.

  “Probably not. I’m damned sure I don’t know who I am. But you’d better come inside out of the rain.”

  Because he could have used the flex and had chosen not a delicious feeling of defiance pervaded Godwin now, growing fiercer with every tread of the staircase. He was almost giddy by the time he opened the door of his room and recklessly activated it, making a random choice and hitting on Dirk van Beelden’s place. She followed him across the threshold into a huge apartment paneled with sleek polished woods and hung with colorful batik work, and gasped as she realized that from gray and rain-swept London she could look out on the brilliant sunshine of a Balinese village. The air was full of steamy tropical scents. A gamelan orchestra was rehearsing, getting the melody wrong, and repeatedly breaking into laughter.

  A parrot flew squawking out of a nearby treetop and made her jump.

  Pleased with her reaction, Godwin signaled open the door of a wardrobe to reveal rows of fluffy terrycloth robes and piles of polychrome towels.

  “Here!” he said, seizing one of each and tossing them toward her. “Dry off—you must be even worse soaked than I am.”

  She caught them neatly in midair and stood for a long second gazing at him while he peeled off his jacket and shirt and took a towel to dry his own hair. Then she said, “I’ve been dreaming of this moment for forty years.”

  “What?” Disconcerted, he blinked at her.

  “To be alone in a room with the man of my dreams, ready to undress before him.” Her tone was absolutely level, almost chilling in its impersonality. “But you aren’t him. You aren’t even like him, or anybody I ever met or dreamed of. How the hell do you account for this?”

  Her voice abruptly took on passion as she flung away the towel and robe and once again extended her scrap of newspaper.

  He accepted it and this time actually read it. Under the second of the four pictures on the right, a carefully posed portrait which as she had promised showed the face Godwin wore, the caption identified F/Lt. S.W. Ransome, G.M. The same name appeared in the text at the left, where details of Ransome’s heroic action in saving a little girl from a house wrecked by a flying bomb were given in fulsome terms.

  Godwin studied it for a while, pondering. Then he handed it back and turned to his memento display, which—alone of the contents of his home—remained unchanged regardless of what else altered. He removed and mutely proffered his medal, and the nearly identical cutting from his pocket.

  Mechanically brushing aside her still water-heavy locks, she looked from one copy to the other. She said half hopefully, “Your father…?”

  But it was a vain notion. She discarded it instantly, while he was still thinking with vague surprise: yes, of course, I must have had a father, I suppose.

  “You had it forged,” she challenged now. “You saw the likeness and got a printer to imitate it and substitute your own name—God knows why, since you’re much too young for anyone to be taken in… Are you really called Godwin Harpinshield?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t have it faked.”

  “If you can say that with a straight face you must be out of your mind. I don’t know what kind of crazy fantasy you’ve invented, but I don’t want any part of it. I want to get out of here. Right away!”

  Godwin sighed and let his towel fall. “You may, of course. If you like. Back to the world where your daughter is given up for dead.”

  The gamelan finally got it right and embarked on one of the complex, flowing, half-improvised, half-composed structures of sound which musicologists regard as the next most advanced form after the European symphony. Barbara waited a little before speaking again, seeming to find enjoyment in being distracted by the music.

  “You claim to know she isn’t,” she said finally.

  “Yes.”

  “The police think she must be. They’ve been hunting her for weeks.”

  “And?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aren’t they saying that the lead which brought them to me was a dead end?” Godwin parodied a grin; what trace of humor there was in it did not reach his eyes.

  “They said that about all of them. But there was something odd about the way they acted here—I mean outside, talking to you. I was watching. You noticed me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well…” She shrugged. Rain was still trickling out of her hair, tracing down her forehead; with sudden irritation she whipped off her plastic snood and reclaimed the towel. Wiping her face, she concluded, “When I stopped believing them I decided to come back.”

  “Because you don’t want to believe she’s dead.”

  “Of course I don’t!”

  “Where were you when she disappeared?”

  “I was in Hollywood on business, trying to close a deal for a TV series. Dora was safe in school, or should have been. You were seen with her. Didn’t you talk to her? Did you just use her and drop her? Or what?”

  “I talked a lot to her.”

  “Where is she, then?”

  She had been drying herself one-handed; now she suddenly recollected that that was because her press cutting was in the other hand. Folding it with care, she tucked it into her hip pocket.

  “It wouldn’t do any good if I told you. Nobody can find her unless she wants to be found. I already explained that.”

  “Oh, stuff your nonsense! If she’s alive, I’ll find her. If I have to spend every penny on detectives I’ll— What’s wrong with you all of a sudden?”

  For Godwin had turned perfectly pale, shut his eyes, and began to swayback and forth, head spinning with memories of the hideous scene he had witnessed by Whitestone Pond. He fully expected the pangs of punishment to gripe at him, but nothing worse than nausea eventuated; perhaps the owners thought that only a reminder was called for.

  He was able after a few seconds to recover his wits and say in a calm voice, “Until today there was a detective who could have found her. But he’s dead, and there’s no help for it… Come on, let’s have a drink. I’m going to. I need one.”

  She still hesitated a moment longer, then yielded and turned to the nearest chair. “All right,” she muttered. “You know, sometimes I wish I didn’t give a damn for my bloody daughter, but… Well, there it is, and I’m stuck with it. What have you got?”

  “Anything.”

  “Then I’ll have—I’ll have a margarita.”

  In the cupboard which Godwin opened there were bottles of tequila and triple-sec, fresh limes, chilled glasses resting rim down in a bed of sea-salt. Without a word he proceeded to the mixing.

  She said after a little, “Suppose I’d asked for a sazerac. Or a gin sling. Or a planter’s punch.”

  “You’d have got it. Here.” He brought her glass.

  “It’s very good,” she said grudgingly, having sipped.

  “Thank you.” He dropped into a chair facing hers.

  “But who the hell are you? And what are you doing living here? I mean, this street is practically a slum, and—hell, I don’t know what this place must cost to run, but I never saw anything like it, not even in Beverly Hills! This artificial view of yours—”

  “Artificial?”

  “Who are you trying to kid? It must be done with—oh, I’m no expert, but… Film projectors! Tapes, bottled smells, a computer to run the whole shebang!
”

  “Go to the window and lean out.”

  She gazed at him dubiously. Then, with an air of determination, she did exactly that. Leaning over the sill, she bit her lip. Then she stretched as far as she could into the air beyond, as though expecting to find solidity, an end to the illusion. There was none.

  “There’s a bamboo staircase outside,” she said at last.

  “You can walk down it if you want. If you’re sick of this year’s gray cold summer let’s go for a swim. This is Dirk van Beelden’s place on the north coast of Bali. People here don’t mind Europeans swimming nude. It’s regarded as a forgivable eccentricity. They do the same themselves, but they prefer fresh water. Some of them are learning a taste for sea bathing, though. At any rate you won’t need a costume.”

  “I…” She shook her head dizzily. “Did you put something in my drink?”

  “Exactly what always goes into a margarita.”

  “But—but this whole thing is impossible!”

  “I disagree. You see, I’m used to it. As far as I’m concerned, this is simply the place where I live.”

  “But Bali? In the middle of a dirty London suburb?”

  “Or Venice or Paris or Rio or Nassau or wherever takes my fancy. I have friends all round the world.”

  “It’s an illusion,” she said positively. “It has to be. For one thing”—with sudden triumph—“Bali’s on the opposite side of the Earth. It can’t possibly be high noon there when it’s daytime here!”

  “That’s taken care of,” Godwin sighed. “Walk down those stairs, you’ll meet Dirk and swim from his beach and eat the rijstaafel and acquire sunburn, indigestion, and a hangover—if that’s what you’d regard as evidence.” He spread his hands.

  Slowly, as though summoning all her courage, she made for the window again and seemed about to step onto the balcony when another parrot, screaming even louder, shot out of the overhanging tree, and she snatched back her hand with a cry.