Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester

by Alfred Bester

“Mrs. North,” Violet said.

  “Who, my dear? Oh, yes, Pamela North, the lady detective. No—no, I think not. This is hardly a case for a woman.”

  “Why not, Mr. De Sica?”

  “There are prospects of violence that make it unsuited to the tender sex, my dear Audrey.”

  “I don’t see that,” Violet said. “We women can take care of ourselves.”

  “She is right,” Miss Garbo growled.

  “I think not, Greta; and her experience last night proves it.”

  “He felled me with a brutal blow when I wasn’t looking,” Violet protested.

  “Perhaps. Shall we vote? I say Nero Wolfe.”

  “Why not Mike Hammer?” Horton demanded. “He gets results, and he doesn’t care how.”

  “But that carelessness may recover the Thundermug in pieces.”

  “My God! I never thought of that. All right, I’ll go along with Wolfe.”

  “Mrs. North,” Miss Garbo said.

  “You are outvoted, cara mia. So, it is to be Wolfe, then. Bene. I think we had best approach him without Greta, Horton. He is notoriously antipatico to women. Dear ladies, arrivederci.”

  After two of the three Powerful Art Dealers had left, Violet glared at Miss Garbo. “Male chauvinists!” she grumbled. “Are we going to stand for it?”

  “Vhat can ve do about it, Audrey?”

  “Miss Garbo, I want permission to track that man down myself.”

  “You do not mean this?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “But vhat could you do?”

  “There has to be a woman in his life somewhere.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Cherchez la femme.”

  “But that is brilliant!”

  “He mentioned a few likely names, so if I find her, I find him. May I have a leave of absence, Miss Garbo?”

  “Go, Audrey. Bring him back alive.”

  The old lady wearing the Welsh hat, white apron, hexagonal spectacles, and carrying a mass of knitting bristling with needles, stumbled on the reproduction of the Spanish Stairs, which led to the King’s Arms Residenza. The King’s Arms was shaped like an imperial crown, with a fifty-foot replica of the Hope diamond sparkling on top.

  “Damn!” Violet Dugan muttered. “I shouldn’t have been so authentic with the shoes. Sandals are hell.”

  She entered the Residenza and mounted to the tenth floor, where she rang a hanging bell alongside a door flanked by a lion and a unicorn, which roared and brayed alternately. The door turned misty and then cleared, revealing an Alice in Wonderland with great innocent eyes.

  “Lou?” she said eagerly. Then her face fell.

  “Good morning. Miss Powell,” Violet said, her eyes peering past the lady and examining the apartment. “I represent Slander Service, Inc. Does gossip give you the go-by? Are you missing out on the juiciest scandals? Our staff of trained mongers guarantees the latest news within five minutes after the event; news defamatory, news derogatory, news libelous, scurrilous, disparaging and vituperative—”

  “Flam,” Miss Powell said. The door turned opaque.

  The Marquise de Pompadour, in full brocade skirt and lace bodice, her powdered wig standing no less than two feet high, entered the grilled portico of Birdies’ Rest, a private home shaped like a birdcage. A cacophony of bird calls assailed the ears from the gilt dome. Madame Pompadour blew the bird whistle set in the door, which was shaped like a cuckoo clock. The little hatch above the clock face flew open, and a TV eye popped out with a cheerful “Cuckoo!” and inspected her.

  Violet sank into a deep curtsy. “May I see the lady of the house, please?”

  The door opened. Peter Pan stood there, dressed in Lincoln-green transparencies, which revealed her sex.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Withers. This is Avon calling. Ignatz Avon, the Topper Tailor, designs wigs, transformations, chignons, merkins, toupees and hairpieces for fun, fashion and—”

  “Fawf,” Miss Withers said. The door slammed. The Marquise de Pompadour fawfed.

  The Left Bank artiste in beret and velvet smock carried her palette and easel to the fifteenth floor of La Pyramide. Just under the apex there were six Egyptian columns fronting a massive basalt door. When the artiste tossed baksheesh onto a stone beggar’s plate, the door swung open on pivots, revealing a gloomy tomb in which stood a Cleopatra type dressed like a Cretan serpent goddess, with serpents to match.

  “Good monrning, Miss Russell. Tiffany’s proudly presents a new coup in organic jewelry, the Tifftoo skin gems. Tattooed in high relief, Tifftoo skin gems incorporate a source of gamma radiation, warranted harmless for thirty days, which outscintillates diamonds of the finest water.”

  “Shlock!” Miss Russell said. The door closed on its pivots, accompanied by the closing bars of Aïda, softly moaned by a harmonica choir.

  The schoolmarm in crisp tailleur, her hair skinned back into a tight bun, her eyes magnified by thick glasses, carried her school-books across the drawbridge of The Manor House. She was lifted by a crenelated elevator to the twelfth floor, where she was forced to leap across a small moat before she could wield the door knocker, which was shaped like a mailed fist. The door rumbled upward, a miniature portcullis, and there stood Goldilocks.

  “Louis?” she laughed. Then her face fell.

  “Good evening, Miss Mansfield. Read-Eze offers a spectacular new personalized service. Why submit to the monotony of mechanical readers when Read-Eze experts with cultivated voices, capable of coloring each individual word, will, in person, read you comic books, true-confession and movie magazines at five dollars an hour; mysteries, westerns and society columns at—”

  The portcullis rumbled down.

  “First Lou, then Louis,” Violet muttered. “I wonder.”

  The little pagoda was set in an exact reproduction of the landscape on a Willow Pattern plate, including the figures of three coolies posed on the bridge. The movie starlet wearing black sunglasses and a white sweater stretched over her forty-four-inch poitrine, patted their heads as she passed.

  “That tickles, doll,” the last one said.

  “Oh, excuse me! I thought you were dummies.”

  “At fifty cents an hour we are, but that’s show business.”

  Madame Butterfly came to the archway of the pagoda, hissing and bowing like a geisha, but rather oddly decorated with a black patch over her left eye.

  “Good morning, Miss Fonda. Sky’s The Limit is making an introductory offer of a revolutionary concept in bosom uplift. One application of Breast-G, our flesh-tinted antigravity powder, under the bust works miracles. Comes in three tints: blond, titian and brunette; and three uplifts: grapefruit, Persian melon and—”

  “I don’t need no balloon ascension,” Miss Fonda said drearily. “Fawf.”

  “Sorry to have bothered you.” Violet hesitated. “Forgive me, Miss Fonda, but isn’t that eye patch out of character?”

  “It ain’t no prop, dearie; it’s for Real City. That Jourdan’s a bastard.”

  “Jourdan,” Violet said to herself, retracing her steps across the bridge. “Louis Jourdan. Could it be?”

  The frogman in black rubber, complete with full scuba equipment including face mask, oxygen tank, and harpoon, trudged through the jungle path to Strawberry Hill Place, frightening the chimpanzees. In the distance an elephant trumpeted. The frogman banged on a brazen gong suspended from a coconut palm, and African drums answered. A seven-foot Watusi appeared and conducted the visitor to the rear of the house, where a Pocahontas type was dangling her legs in a hundred-foot replica of the Congo.

  “Is it Louis Bwana?” she called. Then her face fell.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Tarzan,” Violet said. “Up-Chuck, with a fifty-year record of bonded performance, guarantees sterile swimming pleasure whether it’s an Olympic pool or just a plain, old-fashioned swimming hole. With its patented mercury-pump vacuum-cleaning system, Up-Chuck chucks up mud, sand, silt, drunks, dregs, debris—”

  The brazen
gong sounded, and was again answered by drums.

  “Oh! That must be Louis now,” Miss Tarzan cried. “I knew he’d keep his promise.”

  Miss Tarzan ran around to the front of the house. Miss Dugan pulled the mask down over her face and plunged into the Congo. On the far side she came to the surface behind a frond of bamboo, alongside a most realistic alligator. She poked its head once to make sure it was stuffed. Then she turned just in time to see Sam Bauer come strolling into the jungle garden, arm in arm with Jane Tarzan.

  Concealed in the telephone-shaped booth across the street from Strawberry Hill Place, Violet Dugan and Miss Garbo argued heatedly.

  “It vas a mistake to call the police, Audrey.”

  “No, Miss Garbo.”

  “Inspector Robinson has been in that house ten minutes already. He vill blunder again.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on, Miss Garbo.”

  “Then I vas right. You do not vant this—this Louis Jourdan to be caught.”

  “I do, Miss Garbo. I do! If you’ll just let me explain!”

  “He captured your fancy vith his indecent proposal.”

  “Please listen, Miss Garbo. The important thing isn’t so much to catch him as it is to recover the stolen loot. Isn’t that right?”

  “Excuses! Excuses!”

  “If he’s arrested now, he may never tell us where the Thunder-mug is.”

  “So?”

  “So we’ve got to make him show us where it is.”

  “But how?”

  “I’ve taken a leaf from his book. Remember how he duped a decoy into fooling the police?”

  “That stupid creature Bendix.”

  “Well, Inspector Robinson is our decoy. Oh, look! Something’s happening.”

  Pandemonium was breaking loose in Strawberry Hill Place. The chimpanzees were screaming and flitting from branch to branch. The Watusi appeared, running hard, pursued by Inspector Robinson. The elephant began trumpeting. A giant alligator crawled hastily through the heavy grass. Jane Tarzan appeared, running hard, pursued by Inspector Robinson. The African drums pounded.

  “I could have sworn that alligator was stuffed,” Violet muttered.

  “Vhat vas that, Audrey?”

  “That alligator … Yes, I was right! Excuse me, Miss Garbo. I’ve got to be going.”

  The alligator had risen to its hind legs and was now strolling down Strawberry Lane. Violet left the telephone booth and began following it at a leisurely pace. The spectacle of a strolling alligator followed, at a discreet distance, by a strolling frogman evoked no particular interest in the passers-by of Hollywood East.

  The alligator glanced back over his shoulder once or twice and at last noticed the frogman. He quickened his pace. The frogman stayed with him. He began to run. The frogman ran, was outdistanced, turned on her oxygen tank and began to close the gap. The alligator leaped for a handle on the crosstown straphanger and was borne east, dangling from the cable. The frogman hailed a passing rickshaw. “Follow that alligator!” she cried into the hearing aid of the robot.

  At the zoo, the alligator dropped off the straphanger and disappeared into the crowd. The frogman leaped out of the rickshaw and hunted frantically through the Berlin House, the Moscow House and the London House. In the Rome House, where sightseers were tossing pizzas to the specimens behind the bars, she saw one of the Romans lying naked and unconscious in a small corner cage. Alongside him was an empty alligator skin. Violet looked around hastily and saw Bauer slinking out, dressed in a striped suit and a Brosalino hat.

  She ran after him. Bauer pulled a small boy off an electric carrousel pony, leaped on its back and began galloping west. Violet leaped onto the back of a passing Lama. “Follow that carrousel,” she cried. The Lama began running. “Ch-iao hsi-fu nan tso mei mi chou,” he complained. “But that’s always been my problem.”

  At Hudson Terminal, Bauer abandoned the pony, was corked in a bottle and jetted across the river. Violet leaped into the coxswain’s seat of an eight-oared shell. “Follow that bottle,” she cried. On the Jersey side (Nevada East) Violet pursued Bauer onto the Freeway and thence, by Dodge-Em Kar, to Old Newark, where Bauer leaped onto a trampoline and was catapulted up to the forward cylinder of the Block Island & Nantucket Monorail. Violet shrewdly waited until the monorail left the terminal, and then just made the rear cylinder.

  Inside, at point of harpoon, she held up a teenage madam and forced her to exchange clothes. Dressed in opera pumps, black net stockings, checked skirt, silk blouse and hair rollers, she threw the cursing madam off the monorail at the East Vine Street station and began watching the forward cylinder more openly. At Montauk, the eastermost point on Catalina East, Bauer slipped off.

  Again she waited until the monorail was leaving the station before she followed. On the platform below, Bauer slid into a Commuters’ Cannon and was shot into space. Violet ran to the same cannon, carefully left the coordinate dials exactly as Bauer had set them, and slipped into the muzzle. She was shot off less than thirty seconds after Bauer, and bounced into the landing net just as he was climbing down the rope ladder.

  “You!” he exclaimed.

  “Me.”

  “Was that you in the frog suit?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I ditched you in Newark.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she said grimly. “I’ve got you dead to rights, Kid.”

  Then she saw the house.

  It was shaped like the house that children used to draw back in the twentieth century: two stories; peaked roof, covered with torn tar paper; dirty brown shingles, half of them hanging; plain windows with four panes in each sash; brick chimney overgrown with poison ivy; sagging front porch; the rotted remains of a two-car garage on the right; a clump of sickly sumac on the left. In the gloom of evening it looked like a haunted house.

  “Oh, Sam,” she breathed. “It’s beautiful!”

  “It’s a home,” he said simply.

  “What’s it like inside?”

  “Come and see.”

  Inside it was unadulterated mail-order house; it was dime store, bargain basement, second hand, castoff, thrift shop, flea market.

  “It’s sheer heaven,” Violet said. She lingered lovingly over the power sweeper, canister-type, w. vinyl bumper. “It’s so—so soothing. I haven’t been this happy in years.”

  “Wait, wait!” Bauer said, bursting with pride. He knelt before the fireplace and lit a birch-log fire. The flames crackled yellow and orange. “Look,” he said. “Real wood, and real flames. And I know a museum where they’ve got a pair of matching andirons.”

  “No! Really?”

  He nodded. “The Peabody, at Yale High.”

  Violet made up her mind. “Sam, I’ll help you.”

  He stared at her.

  “I’ll help you steal them,” she said. “I—I’ll help you steal anything you want.”

  “You mean that, Violet?”

  “I was a fool. I never realized… . I—You were right. I should never have let such a silly thing come between us.”

  “You’re not just saying that to trick me, Violet?”

  “I’m not, Sam. Honest.”

  “Or because you love my house?”

  “Of course I love it, but that’s not the whole reason.”

  “Then we’re partners?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shake.”

  Instead she flung her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. Minutes later, on the Serofoam recliner chair w. three-way mechanism, she murmured in his ear, “It’s us against everybody, Sam.”

  “Let ’em watch out, is all I have to say.”

  “And ‘everybody’ includes those women named Jane.”

  “Violet, I swear it was never serious with them. If you could see them—”

  “I have.”

  “You have? Where? How?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, hush!”
<
br />   Much later he said, “If we don’t put a lock on that bedroom door, we’re in for trouble.”

  “To hell with the lock,” Violet said.

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN,” a voice blared.

  Sam and Violet scrambled out of the chair in astonishment. Blue-white light blazed through the windows of the house. There came the excited clamor of a lynch mob, the galloping crescendo of the William Tell Overture, and sound effects of the Kentucky Derby, a 4-6-4 locomotive, destroyers at battle stations, and the Saskatchewan Rapids.

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN,” the voice brayed again.

  They ran to a window and peered out. The house was surrounded by blinding Klieg lights. Dimly they could see a horde of Jacqueries with a guillotine, television and news cameras, a ninety-piece orchestra, a battery of sound tables manned by technicians wearing earphones, a director in jodhpurs carrying a megaphone, Inspector Robinson at a microphone, and a ring of canvas deck chairs in which were seated a dozen men and women wearing theatrical makeup.

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN. THIS IS INSPECTOR EDWARD G. ROBINSON SPEAKING. YOU ARE SURROUNDED. WE—WHAT? OH, TIME FOR A COMMERCIAL? ALL RIGHT. GO AHEAD.”

  Bauer glared at Violet. “So it was a trick.”

  “No, Sam, I swear it.”

  “Then what are they doing here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You brought them.”

  “No, Sam, no! I—Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Maybe they trailed me when I was chasing you; but I swear I never saw them.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, Sam.” She began to cry.

  “You sold me out.”

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN. ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN. YOU WILL RELEASE AUDREY HEPBURN AT ONCE.”

  “Who?” Bauer was confused.

  “Th-that’s me,” Violet sobbed. “It’s the name I took, just like you. Audrey Hepburn and Violet Dugan are one and the s-same person. They think you captured me; but I didn’t sell you out, S-Sam. I’m no fink.”

  “You’re leveling with me?”

  “Honest.”

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN. WE KNOW YOU ARE THE ARTSY-CRAFTSY KID. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP. RELEASE AUDREY HEPBURN AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.”

  Bauer flung the window open. “Come and get me, copper,” he yelled.