"And so we say good-by to the colorful, romantic twentieth century with its many tribes, its primitive peoples, and its quaint customs." He turned to stare at Donald, directing a low-voiced order at the dumfounded man. "And see that you get here on time after this, chum. No more of that silly saxophone business."
The conveyance wheeled across the room and vanished into the opposite wall, the lady in the rear seat turning for a last amused look at the quaint mill-era furniture. Her face faded and the visitors were gone.
"Donald—" his wife quavered.
"They can't do that to me!" Donald roared. "I'm a taxpayer! I'll see my precinct committeeman about this!"
"Wasn't he a nice man, Daddy?"
Daddy correctly reasoned that the nice, uniformed man and his strange conveyance of ghostly passengers would be back on the following night. He readied himself accordingly.
A few minutes before Judy's usual bedtime the vehicle nosed through one wall of the bedroom and the uniformed guide could be seen rising from his seat, preparatory to spouting his lecture on the twentieth-century family unit. As he solidified he glanced about the room, noting the absence of Donald's wife and child.
"Come, come now," he said with displeasure. "Bring in the remainder of your family. We have a nice crowd today."
"I've got a surprise for you," Donald replied softly. "Indeed?" said the guide. "What?"
"This!" Donald cried, and brought from behind him a double-barreled shotgun. He raised the weapon and fired both barrels at the crowded car. Plaster fountained from the opposite wall and the bedroom window crashed down in shards.
The guide shook his head. "For shame! Please call the family"—he reached behind him to pick up a saxophone—"or must I perform another tune?"
"This," he said to the watching tourists, "is a male of the twentieth century. You have just witnessed a primitive fireworks display used by these people to welcome visitors to their land or to celebrate special holidays dedicated to their gods. It would be a generous gesture on our part to show this man we appreciate the display he has prepared for us. Early peoples, you know, thrive on flattery and attention." He broke into polite applause and the tourists seated behind him took it up. Someone pitched a few coins.
Donald hurled the gun to the floor and stamped on it.
"The twentieth-century man is now beginning his dance of welcome, a tribal ritual which has come down to him from the campfires of his ancestors who roamed the forests still hundreds of years away. I hold in my hand a musical instrument of this age called a saxophone, and presently I will blow a little tune which will summon his mate and child from the nether regions of the building in which they dwell . . ."
Donald kept trying. On the following night he laboriously strung a length of hose from the second-floor bathroom to the bedroom, and as the visitors emerged from the wall—a rather thin crowd this particular trip—he attempted to douse them with a strong stream of water. The water squirted through the visitors and splashed down the cracked wall on the opposite side of the room.
"This," said the guide, "is a twentieth-century male. He is welcoming us to his dwelling place with a water ritual designed to wash away the evil spirits which he fears may hamper our coming. When he has thoroughly cleansed the walls of his dwelling and made the unit safe for us, he will begin his dance of welcome and we will be expected to show our appreciation by applause or small gifts and coins. Afterward, by making notes on this instrument in my hand, the remainder of his family will approach. Now, note the quaint furniture of the—"
In an aside as he was leaving, the guide confided to
Donald, "Keep it up, chum. You put on the best show on my entire run. We're getting good word-of-mouth advertising."
Donald kept it up. He tried stink bombs, which succeeded only in forcing him and his family out of the house; he brought in a radio, a phonograph, several automobile horns and a borrowed siren in an effort to drive away the tourists from the future by a sheer wall of noise, and succeeded only in blasting his own eardrums; he turned a swarm of bees loose in the room and wound up with numerous stings; he was forcefully prevented by his wife from piling the furniture and the bedding in the room's center and setting fire to it as the guide and his conveyance appeared through the wall.
"This is a man of the twentieth century. He is preparing to welcome us by setting fire to those numerous small red objects you see lying about the floor of the dwelling unit. Presently the red objects will explode with a tremendous repercussion, driving away evil spirits lurking here—he believes—and making our visit a safe one. Now, please note . . ."
A red-eyed haggard man stood on a street corner, leaning dazedly against the lamp post. His wife had left him and returned to her mother, declaring that she and their child would return to that horrible house when—and only when—he had rid Judy's room of those horrible visitations once and for all. He hadn't reported for work for over a week and his job was in danger; he hadn't slept for the same length of time and his health was in similar jeopardy. His friends avoided him, believing he had fallen into the clutches of the demon rum. All in all, he was a sad specimen of twentieth-century man. And he was on the verge of ending it all when the bus went by.
Someone babbling in a loud voice caught his attention, and he glanced up, cringing instinctively at the sight of a rubberneck bus wheeling along the street. Sick at heart, he turned his back to discover passers-by gazing curiously at the bus.
Donald opened his eyes wide.
The low bodied motor conveyance made its nightly appearance through the wall, and Donald saw the guide rising from his seat to address the tourists behind him. Donald folded his arms and waited. The entire vehicle, well crowded, came into view and stopped.
The uniformed guide looked at him inquiringly. "Pretty quiet around here, chum. Can't you whip up something?"
"I certainly can, mister," Donald told him. "Just you wait right here." He crossed to the bedroom door and flung it open, jumping back to avoid the mob. "Here they are, folks," he shouted, "as advertised." Holding out his hat, he admitted the crowd into the room, watching carefully to see that each dropped a coin into the receptacle.
"Real, genuine ghosts, folks! The only haunted house in Libertyville! Each night and every night on the hour this ghostly crew rides out of that wall yonder and parades across the room. Step right up to them, folks; try to touch them; try to feel them. You can't! Come right in and meet my ghosts."
The small bedroom was suddenly filled with awed, milling people crowding forward to gaze at the ghostly conveyance. Curious hands reached out to touch the future tourists, only to grasp the empty air. Flashbulbs popped as newspaper photographers snapped what they hoped would be pictures of the visitation. A representative of the American Ethereal Society pinched his glasses to his nose and held a lighted match to the ghostly guide's natty uniform, testing to see if flaming gauze netting would reveal a trickery. The guide stared at the flashbulbs, slightly taken aback.
"Come now," he said, "this will be reported."
"He talks, he walks, he plays a saxophone!" Donald shouted above the din. "A real, genuine ghost, folks. Step right up and take a look at the real article!"
"Where in hell did they come from?" a reporter wanted to know, brazenly pushing two fingers into and through the disapproving face of the guide. "I'm damned if they scare me!"
"He's a legend connected with the house," Donald explained glibly. "According to the story, this fellow in the uniform was an eccentric inventor who used to live here, but he finally killed himself. The story says he was a 4-F but he wore that uniform to ease his conscience; he always claimed to be inventing war machines for the Government. See all those people behind him?"
Necks craned to look at the tourists.
"They were murdered!" Donald whispered hoarsely. "According to the legend, this crazy inventor murdered them all and sealed their bodies up in the wall. And now, every night he lines up all the ghosts on this crazy machine he
imagines he invented and rides them through the walls."
A fresh onslaught of people in the doorway drew his attention. Snatching up the hatful of jingling coins, Donald fought his way to the door.
"Step right in, folks. The ghosts are here! Come right in and meet genuine ghosts in the only haunted house in town! Each night and every night . . ."
Donald's wife and child returned home the following weekend. Judy was installed in a new bedroom, and in due time developed an intense interest in Hopalong Cassidy.
RAINMAKER
by JOHN REESE
The phone clanged at exactly 3:53 A.M. Bill Lawson groaned and took it groggily on his back, keeping his eyes shut and his bare arm under the covers. It would be blazing hot by noon, late June being what it is in southern California, but there was a sharp, mountainish chill abroad now.
"H'lo, Lawson speakin'," he mumbled, sure of a wrong number.
A girl operator said, "One minute, Bill. Mr. Beck is calling, but he's on another line." He found himself cut off. He sat up and groped for his slippers and a cigarette, wondering why he felt so depressed.
It came to him after a minute, as he clung to the dead line. He had danced at the Palladium with Patty Vernier until two o'clock. From Hollywood to Patty's home in Studio City was a fast thirty-minute drive. Studio City lay in the San Fernando Valley, northwest of Los Angeles. Bill lived in Temple City, in the San Gabriel Valley, northeast of Los Angeles. From her home to his adequate but lonely bachelor residence was a fast hour's drive through Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, and San Gabriel.
In other words, he had been asleep at least twenty minutes, not enough to say he had "slept on" his problem. He knew his mind was not subtle—that he had made Patty mad, or hurt her, or something. "No girl likes to be taken for granted." That's what she said. He was only trying to say that he trusted her, believed her . . .
"Hiyah, Bill!" came the drowsy-cheery voice of Sid Beck, night operator at the California State Weather Service Station at Pomona, thirty miles up the San Gabriel Valley. "Want a big fat rain?"
"At this hour?" Bill moaned.
"Why not? I need it personally. Got some zinnias in bad shape, Bill. Hang on a minute—other phone—expecting the blimp to check in over Inglewood."
Again Bill was cut off. He stood up and switched on the ceiling light and studied the big meteorological map of southern California on the wall over his bed.
Things had changed a lot since scientists first seeded clouds with pellets of dry ice, making them discharge their moisture in the form of artificial rain, twenty-odd years ago. Bill was a kid of eight when he watched a little cub plane make three passes at a cirro-cumulus formation over a grass fire in the Santa Monica Mountains, just about the time the Japanese surrendered—some time in the middle forties, anyway.
It didn't work, and the fire burned itself out, but the kid of eight knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. A rainmaker. Now, at twenty-eight, William Lawson had held California Precipitation Permit No. 1 for six years, ever since the state started granting them under the Supreme Court decision.
The permit meant he was a skilled airplane pilot. It meant he had two years of college meteorology. It meant he could tell you at any given time what crops were in what growing stages, and where. It meant he could tell you, without looking at the charts, each of the two dozen two-day to five-day periods during the hot, dry southern California summer when a rain would do a lot of good for everyone and harm to no one. Charts? He had written most of them himself.
He was a pioneer, and now it was a business, same as any other. Who owned the clouds? Riparian law, governing streams and watersheds, had gone aloft, and Bill's name was on most of the litigation that took it there—generally as defendant. He had been sued for making it rain and sued for not making it rain. He had been the first man ever enjoined by a Federal District Court from making it rain, in "City of San Diego vs. Lawson, Coachella Date Growers Association, et al."
Won that one, too, when it rained anyway. "Respondent is not God," said the unanimous Supreme Court decision. "He does not create rain, on the evidence. Neither has he violated divine or natural law, since it rained anyway. It appears, rather, that he acts in strict accordance with such law, and that the injunction should have been directed against the Creator, rather than respondent. It is therefore vacated, since it is beyond the power of man to write or enforce any law which supersedes or attempts the illusion of superseding divine or natural law."
Sid Beck came back on the line as Bill scratched himself and studied his charts and maps. "Blimp, all right, confirming that the mass appears to be detached. Big black cold front, probably high density, moving in from the Pacific bank over White's Point on a six-mile southerly wind," Sid said.
"Put my name on it." Bill yawned. "I'll start calling clients."
He hung up and tried to focus his eyes on the bedside telephone directory and his mind on his business. He kept seeing Patty's angry pink face and angry brown eyes. Nikano, the aged Japanese who kept house for him, brought in black coffee without being told. Bill dialed the Rosemead Airport and told them to warm her up.
"Now, let's see; McQueen, McQueen."
The phone rang again. It was Jerry Rudd this time, and no way to start a day. Jerry was a millionaire perishable-crop and citrus-farm operator who rubbed Bill the wrong way. He lived in a hundred-thousand dollar house in Toluca Lake, less than a mile from Patty Vernier and her mother, in the San Fernando Valley. Unfortunately, his intentions were honorable. He wanted to take Patty—and her mother—on a honeymoon cruise through Panama to Florida and Havana on his three-hundred-thousand-dollar yacht.
It started when Patty said, "Mama's all in favor of it." Bill howled at this treachery because he had always been fair to Mrs. Vernier. One word led to another, and pretty soon Patty's eyes were snapping as she said, "Well, you certainly take a lot for granted, including me! Maybe I'd better think the whole thing over." She did not hand him his diamond, but she came close to it.
"Now what do you want?" Bill growled at the cause of his troubles.
Jerry laughed his infectious laugh. Even at four in the morning he was the personality kid, a dangerous adversary with or without money and a yacht.
"Just had a call about a detached cold mass from my man down at Newport," Jerry said. "He tells me that—"
"Your what down at where?" Bill interrupted, making him say it.
"The skipper of my boat. He tells me they're fogged in, and Pomona says you're already on notice. Peas, spinach, and citrus can all use—"
"Nothing doing!" Bill cut in. "You got the last one over there, and it's our turn out here. Besides, the State Highway Department is detouring twenty-five thousand cars a day through an unpaved stubble field on the Sepulveda tunnel near you."
"I've already put in a call for the governor on that," Jerry said serenely.
"Put in your call to the people driving those twenty-five thousand cars, Jerry. I don't want to make everybody sore at me, even if the governor is your pal. Now don't argue. Irrigate and be damned to you! I won't do it."
He took pleasure in hanging up. He called the operator and got two numbers at once, to settle it in one three-way conversation. Roy McQueen, at Duarte, headed the San Gabriel Valley Early Tomato Crop Association; Ollie Niehouse, at Azusa, the San Gabriel Grape Growers. They promised to check their executive committees and call him back.
He got their calls on his auto telephone en route to the airport. Go to it, they said. Some of the tomato men had already started to irrigate, but thousands of feet of precious water could still be saved.
His plane was already ticking away on the apron of the runway. It was an old but serviceable two-engine job. He loaded his six discharge ports with pellets of dry ice from the freezing cabinet, and it was exactly 4:36 when he took off and spiraled upward in a bad temper.
Usually he got a kick out of going up at this hour of the day and watching it make or break below him. At forty-five hun
dred feet he could see hints of sun through the light high haze to the east. Below him was only a dense gray blanket. Good stuff, but it gave him no pleasure. "No girl likes to be taken for granted." Ye gods, he only wanted to tell her he knew she wasn't the mercenary type, to be swept off her feet by ...
His phone buzzed two longs, a short, two longs. He lifted the instrument, switched the automatic pilot on for a tight circle, and leaned back against the cushions to muffle the engine roar.
"Lawson."
"Sid again. Where are you, Bill? Can't get anything informative from the ground because everything's fogged in. Keep me posted."
"Over Alhambra." Bill looked out of his window. "Too broad a movement for me to catch local shifts yet, but she's black and big, and looks sopping wet. I think I'll go out to sea and come in with it. How's it out Pomona way?"
"Clear as a bell. That's what worries me—nothing seems to be moving this way yet. Got one call that shows a possible wind shift up Whittier Narrows, but that's all. Bill, herd it this way."
"W'y shore!" Bill said.
He hung up, took the controls away from the automatic, and gunned southward. The misty gray blanket began to slope downward. He knew when he passed over. Los Angeles Harbor, at San Pedro, by instruments only. To mariners, this was fog. To real-estate salesmen, it was a "nice morning haze." To meteorologists, it was a detached cold mass. To Bill, it was a big batch of sopping-wet stuff that meant up to thirty-five hundred dollars in his kitty if it went where he wanted it to go and he got there at the same time.
At two hundred and ten miles an hour he went twenty miles to sea and suddenly saw the ocean below him. He called Sid.
"Completely detached from the Pacific bank and clear as a bell here. I'm coming in with it now and try to catch the local currents."
"Fine, fine!" said Sid, drawing new lines on his map.
Tomorrow, the Stars Page 7
