The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I could retouch the family tree with a few brighter strokes—hang a rope or two from one of the branches—”

  “I suspect my ancestors on my mother’s side were much more interesting. In fact, I’ve one particular grandmother who started a book about one of her ancestors. It was a mystery book—and she got lost in the mysteries and never finished it. I think I’ll have you work on that a part of the time.”

  “Of course, gladly. That is, if your father doesn’t mind.”

  “He’s so busy working on Verle Marble’s plan for the underfed that he should not be trying to oversee this project. So I told him I’d take this project over.”

  “Then you’re my boss?”

  “What are you jumping around for?” I seemed to have been sitting up on the study table and to have bounded down like a schoolboy at recess gong. I summoned all my dignity.

  “I shall endeavor to be a satisfactory employee,” I said stiffly.

  “Come, Mr. Flinders, you needn’t be like that. Unbend! Must you always go to extremes? We should be friends?”

  I nodded eagerly. Much too eagerly—for her cordial smile gave way to one of those aristocratic cold-shoulder looks. She rose and picked up her hat and gloves.

  “I’ll send you further instructions, Mr. Flinders. Good day.”

  The instructions reached me the next morning before the eight o’clock bells over the city sent me off to work. By the twelve o’clock bell I was so deep in the notes of my boss’s grandmother’s mystery that I didn’t stop for lunch.

  When the five o’clock bell rang I gathered up my papers and turned to find Sally Barnes waiting for me. White turban, abbreviated white sports suit, tanned bare legs, blue anklets and white oxfords made her look as cool and refreshing as a mountain-brook, as her blue-gray eyes looked at me with a hint of a smile and a tinge of teasing.

  “Taxi service,” said Sally Barnes. “I’ve been waiting for half an hour. You’re working much too hard.”

  “Blame your grandmother,” I said. “She had a nose for mysteries, believe me. This is a most fascinating bit of family history—”

  “I thought so, too. Tantalizing, in fact. Have you come to grandmother’s funny theory yet? Isn’t it naive? She must have been superstitious, thinking some mysterious fate would revisit the family every few generations.” We sauntered down the steps and got into a convertible—a late model autoplane. She touched the controls. We spun around on its three wheels (few of the late models use four) and in a moment we were swinging around the government plateau, the circular glass plaza, and out on an airport takeoff lane. Another touch of the controls—our wings spread out to cut the air, and up we went into the steamy blue.

  Sally watched the dials until we reached 22,000. There we leveled off and drifted westward across the rugged, snow-capped mountain tops.

  “You’re not nervous about mountain flying, Mr. Flinders? You seem jumpy again today.”

  “That’s from being called Mister. Call me Jim and I’ll feel fine.”

  Sally Barnes gave me a suspicious look. “That sounds like a line out of my grandmother’s mystery. That’s what I’ve brought you up here to talk about. Her superstitions and all—you don’t take any stock in them, do you?”

  “Maybe I was too wrapped up in the fact of her story to catch the superstition,” I said. My job, as I understood it, was to borrow from the grandmother mystery story notes and all other sources I could find, and put together a factual document on the lives of some earlier ancestors.

  “You see, she believed that my great-great-great-great grandmother—a most interesting and charming person by the name of Sally Hart—met a cruel fate—”

  “Sally Hart!” I blurted. “I knew it. I knew it the minute I—”

  “Mr. Flinders, what is the matter with you? Is this altitude too high for you?”

  “Pardon my gasping. Go on. You were saying—”

  “This Sally Hart—you’ll find she becomes my grandmother’s central character as you read on. But you haven’t got that far yet, have you? Her name isn’t revealed in these first notes—”

  “I—er—my knowledge of the times, you know. You say a cruel fate overtook her. Then what? She married a man named Hobbledehoy?”

  “The point is,” said Sally Barnes, never guessing what she was doing to me, “this long-forgotten ancestor named Sally Hart was terribly in love with a man, but before they married something dreadful and unaccountable happened. Her sweetheart, who remains nameless through all her personal records, mysteriously disappeared. Later Hart married someone else, enjoyed two decades of fairly happy married life before her husband died.”

  “Hobbledehoy, the louse!”

  “I don’t remember the name. Anyway, after his death she spent several years of futile search for this earlier lover who had disappeared, and according to her memoirs her grownup children thought her a bit eccentric that she should devote her life to a quest of this man who, after all, was no relative of theirs. But that’s what she did, and when she died she was still firm in her love for this mysterious, nameless person who apparently walked out on her. Do you follow me?”

  “I’m away ahead of you.”

  “And so my grandmother became fascinated with the story and went to work on the angle that this nameless lover was some wandering spirit, undoubtedly evil—”

  “M-m-m-m. I don’t like that theory.”

  “And that this same wandering spirit had approached other members of the family during later generations, threatening to blight their lives with disappointed love—”

  “No! I can’t swallow that!”

  “And that this same fate would return to bring a disappointment to some other member of the family, probably one of Sally Hart’s namesakes. Yes, she was desperately afraid for me. You can’t swallow that either, can you? But you seem to be doing a lot of gulping.”

  “Take me down,” I said. “I’m getting sick.”

  CHAPTER XII

  I Leave a Card

  “Well, Mr. Flinders—Jim, since you don’t mind—you can see that you’re in for an interesting time wading through my grandmother’s funny notions. Superstitions are such silly things, don’t you think? But you know there are lots of businesses that are thriving on people’s fears and ignorance?”

  “This nameless lover who disappeared—” I mumbled, “Do you think he was some evil fate?”

  “Well, there’s no doubt that his leaving was a cruel fate for my great-great-great-great grandmother. But I do feel sure we’ve never unearthed all the story. We may never even discover the man’s name. But if we can ever get over the first hurdle, then the files of the Bureau of Biographical Records may have something for us. You see why I need a careful scholar like yourself to do this research.”

  “You’ve made no mistake, Miss Barnes. I’m undoubedly the man for the job.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. We skimmed over the last of the peaks and nosed down toward Glass Capitol. It was just at that time of twilight when Lord Temp so often craved conversation, and my furtive eyes kept a sharp lookout.

  “Relax, Jim.” Sally Barnes tapped my hand lightly. Then she pointed down the mountainside to the big Indiana limestone mansion and the bright bit of foothills that included the red crags. More than ever those rocks looked like clay-red dinner plates stuck in the ground on an angle. Sally said, “Speaking of superstitions, I suppose you know that that place is the headquarters for the country-wide superstition racket, the SABA?”

  “SABA? SABA?” I frowned. “I’ve seen that word in newspapers. Always written in capitals, isn’t it?”

  “You historians know so much about the past and so little about the present.” Sally laughed. “Those initials, S-A-B-A, stand for ‘See All, Believe All’—and it’s a cult that claims a fifth of all the people in the country. If you believe the ad, it’s the oldest organization in all civilization. And by all odds the most scientific of all systems of foretelling the future.”


  “But how could that be? The people of 1950 never heard of it.”

  “That, according to my father,” said Sally Barnes, “is just one of the reasons why sensible people should keep hands off. He took the trouble to dig to the roots. When he found what a fake it was he wanted to pass a national law to put an end to it. But the big interests of Wurzelle’s friends, coast to coast, are too well satisfied with it.”

  “SABA—Sees All, Believes All”—I laughed. “If SABA told you that Sally Hart’s mystery man was coming into your life, would you believe it?”

  “Don’t be absurd. My grandmother was taken in by the SABA, but not I. You’d be surprised, though, how many prominent men in the government-even members of the Council of Twelve—will make visits to that SABA Temple and come away ‘believing all.’ ”

  “And this is an age of science.”

  “Unfortunately, our very faith in the word science plays right into the hands of these fakirs,” said Sally. “All they have to do is to label their wares scientific, and the gullible public buys. It’s an outrage. But words are free, and genuine science requires too much study for anyone other than a specialist to digest much of it. This SABA food comes predigested and sugar-coated and wrapped in pink packages, so that even people smart enough to be skeptical will feed on it because it satisfied some aesthetic hunger.”

  “You’re a fighter, aren’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Aren’t you picking a scrap with your dead grandmother?”

  “Oh, I’m not blaming her. She didn’t have the chance I’m having. A straight thinker helps keep us children straightened out on things. Only my brother was a little too anxious to learn the hard way, and so he’s out on his own!”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  “He’s away. Setting the world on fire, you know. You’ll hear of him some day. By the way, weren’t you going to hire an assistant on this research job?”

  “I’m still trying to get the young man your father recommended. Maybe I’ll see him tonight . . . What is tonight?”

  I caught a look from Sally that was sufficient answer. She had a date with Leon King, I remembered. They were going to listen to the Executive Secretary’s speech together.

  “I hope you’ll hear the speech too,” she said. “And please don’t look at me that way. Leon King is just one of my friends.”

  We were skimming along on the highway again. The Glass Capitol was all lights and glitter, and the circular drive around the government plaza brought my ride to an end. As I got out of the autoplane I reached for Sally’s hand, but she gave me a quick wave and was off. I watched her until her go-buggy was lost in the stream of bright-toned plastics and tinted metals that gave these traffic-ways such a dizzying skyrocket effect.

  So this girl was Sally Hart’s great-great-great-great granddaughter! I was fairly weaving. It would be easier than falling off a log to plunge head over heels in love.

  But there was a stumbler. I could never ask my children to accept a great-great-great-great great grandfather by the name of Hobbledehoy.

  I spoke to the first man who would lend me his ears.

  “Brother, I’m a stranger in this day and age. When, a fellow’s nerves get tied in knots, where does he go to get untangled? Is there a sanitarium handy?”

  “Have you been to a Public Service Minister? There’s at least one to every downtown block, you know.”

  Down at the end of the first block-long building I found “Public Service Minister” on the directory and rode the elevator up to his office on the sixtieth floor.

  “Your troubles?” he asked cordially. “Anything I can talk over with you?”

  “What’s going to happen to the country?”

  The Public Service Minister, a bespectacled little man with a readiness to laugh at the slightest provocation, sat down and gave me a pamphlet, but said this problem was almost too much for him.

  We talked the subject over and by the time we got down to bed-rock he admitted the cards were stacked for revolution.

  “So you, a Public Service Minister, admit it!”

  “I don’t ask you to quote me,” he said, with a nervous laugh. Then he grew very serious. “I don’t know who you are or why you came. But I can tell you exactly what I think.”

  “Please do.”

  “Very well. Verle Marble won’t wire out with his plan to relieve the underfed. The overfed will throw him for a loss. That’s why I think a revolution is inevitable . . . There, I’ve said it.”

  He acted as if those words would cost him his job. Wasn’t this a land of free speech?

  “We Public Service Ministers,” he explained, “are tax-supported. We’re not substitutes for the ministers of the churches; we are simply advisors to all who come to us with troubles—personal, financial, psychological, moral. We apply our common sense knowledge as best we can. But now that I’ve advocated revolution, my hours in this office are numbered. A loss of salary? That’s not the point. I give one half of my earnings every month to hungry people.”

  I sat for a long time thinking it over.

  Revolution? Would Lord Temp let it happen?

  While I sat there the radio televisor brought in the speech of the Executive, and it was a good, honest plan. But this Public Service Minister kept shaking his important little head.

  “The influential people will say it’s idealistic,” he muttered over. “All you have to do is brand something as idealistic and countless people will think it’s impossible and bad. But many opinion-makers hide what they really think; namely, that idealistic plans might cost them some financial sacrifice. Their chairs are well cushioned, their bread well buttered, their shoes well heeled.”

  By this time the Public Service Minister was pacing in much agitation. Obviously I had uncorked some rebellious talk that he usually kept encased in silence.

  A gong rang out from some skyscraper spire in the next block.

  “Why a bell at this time of day?” I asked innocently.

  “Don’t you know the meaning of the bells? You must hear them regularly three times a day.”

  I nodded. I had supposed they rang a routine working day.

  “Actually they’re meant to be reminders that we Public Service Ministers are ready to help,” he said. “From now on you’ll think of this conference whenever you hear the bell.”

  “But a bell at ten at night?”

  “It’s a Public Service Minister’s privilege to ring a bell whenever he believes some one needs a reminder. The bell you just heard was some minister’s effort to assist someone who is in a crisis at this very minute.”

  “Practically everybody I know is in a crisis,” I said sarcastically.

  The minister only nodded and gave a kindly laugh. “These extra bell ringings don’t come often, but every time they do thousands of people are sure they’re the very ones in need.”

  “And this bell trick really gets ’em?” I asked skeptically.

  “It’s just like a personal reminder to take a deep slow breath when the going gets too tough and you feel the need of a lift.” He waited for my comment. I had nothing to say but much to think about.

  “I’ll go now. Maybe this deep breath has done me good.”

  “You dropped a card,” said the Minister. He picked it up, glanced at the design of Lord Temp in the Chariot of Death. “Or did you mean it for me?”

  “Ugh! No, no, no, I don’t think you want it. You see, I don’t have my name on it yet—”

  He hung onto it. “This has been a curious talk. It goes deeper than our words. I’ll keep this card to remember you by.”

  I returned to the elevator wondering what I had done?

  Would Lord Temp approve?

  While I waited I saw someone I knew dashing out of an upbound elevator. Bobby Hammock!

  “Quick,” he shouted, “there’s another march on the capitol. Hefty and his hoodlums. We’ve got to stop them.” Then the Public Service Minister foll
owed Bobby out, grabbing his hat on the run, and the door locked after them with a bang. They bounded down the rear stairs, Bobby yelling that there’d be a taxi on the next level. By the time I got to a window I saw them shooting out over an elevated trafficway, open a pair of wings to the air and take off over the lighted building tops.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Horror on the Highway

  Whatever my private doubts about the motives of Lord Temp, I’ll give him credit for keeping his ears to the ground and his fingers on all the jumpy public pulses. And for coming through with amazing taxi service.

  Two minutes after the swift exit of Bobby and the Public Service Minister via the trafficway 59 stories up, I was riding along in the same general direction, having been picked up by Lord Temp.

  “Some things can’t wait till Saturday,” said Lord Temp, grinning merrily.

  “Are you making light of that institution known as the weekly bath?”

  “I’m referring to our miracular boon to mankind,” the skeleton replied, snapping his knuckles. “Things are going to happen tonight. I can feel it in my bones.”

  We reached a seemingly deserted spot on the edge of a cornfield that for some reason looked better to Lord Temp in the pitch blackness than scores of other fields we’d passed. We sent our conveyance on its way. Ahead of us was a gray highway bathed by amber floodlights. We sought the thickets along the side and hid among them.

  Soon the marchers came along, a noisy three or four hundred of them, carrying banners.

  An autoplane raced onto the scene from the opposite direction and braked to a stop. The three persons who got out began making motions at the paraders to turn back. First was Bobby, second, the starry-eyed blonde, and third, the Public Service Minister.

  “There’s the man who took one of your cards,” I whispered to Lord Temp. “But you mustn’t do anything to him.”

  “This chance is too good,” said Lord Temp. “We’ll bestow our blessing on several, whether they’ve had an official announcement or not. Any number of these paraders are inviting death, the same as that careless driver we rode with the other night.”