“Like hell you do,” Ruth said viciously, “You can stop right now.”
“You’ll have to excuse my wife,” Sam said apologetically. “Epigraphy always makes her nervous. I don’t know what it is that annoys her so about it.”
“I know,” Debbie said sympathetically. “It so often happens with men of powerful intellect. Your wife simply doesn’t understand you.”
Sam looked pensively at his wife. “Ruth, is that it? You don’t understand me?”
“Oh, you idiot,” Ruth said. “That female’s here to worm the misprint out of you. She’s no more interested in epigraphy than Chuck was. Look at her. Never mind,” Ruth said on second thought. “Don’t look at her. Just tell her to go home.”
“Did you really come to worm that word out of me?” Sam asked.
“Definitely not. Cross my heart,” Debbie answered, crossing a well-developed area. “You can send me right home if I say one word about that misprint.”
“Fair enough,” Sam said with a pleased look at his wife. “All right, now. Let’s get started.”
“Let’s!” Debbie moved in closer to him.
“Epigraphy, as you probably know, is from the Greek ‘epi’ and ‘graphe’ meaning—”
“Oh, Sam” Ruth cried. “I can’t stand this.”
“Well, you go on to bed, dear. I know you’re not interested.”
“Yes,” Debbie said with a sweet smile. “You go to bed. We can carry on.”
“I’ll bet you can,” Ruth said, and slammed the door behind her.
The next morning was Sunday. Ruth arose late and red-eyed. She fixed one cup of coffee, one egg and one piece of toast. When Sam came into the kitchen sniffing the air hungrily, Ruth turned on the radio with a vicious twist and continued eating to a deafening account of the morning news.
Sam got himself a bowl of what he usually referred to as flaked cardboard, turned down the radio and ate unhappily.
Suddenly Ruth forgot how mad she was and put her hand on Sam’s. “Listen!” she cried. The familiar nasal voice of the newscaster was excited.
“What’s behind the lanolin curtain? What happens to the hair that Full Head grows? Why is there an armed guard around the Full Head Building? Don’t call your senator yet. We expect to have a full report on the seven o’clock news tonight. . . . Flash! There has just been an attempted lynch of a Manhattan barber by three bald-headed men in gray flannel suits.”
“Well,” Ruth said vindictively, “I guess that ought to teach Chuck Bradford crime does not pay.”
The doorbell rang.
“I think we’d have more privacy around here,” Sam said gently but reprovingly, “if you didn’t keep speaking of the devil.”
Chuck slunk in the door with paranoidal glances over his left shoulder. “They’re after me,” he said, sinking onto the shabby sofa.
“Good for them!” Ruth commented. “I’ll buy the rope.”
“Kick a handful of moly?” Chuck asked Sam, not very hopefully.
“If you like,” Sam answered, “but it won’t help your formula.”
At this point of impasse in the history of hirsute western civilization, Fate again took a hand. A rather hairy but very capable hand, extending from a black flannel sleeve, pushed the doorbell still warm from Chuck Bradford’s caress.
“The President of the United States,” said the respectable but anonymous-looking man attached to the capable hand, “would like to see you.”
“I had a previous engagement,” Sam said with an uncertain frown. “Of course—”
“The President, too, has a full schedule.”
“Oh, of course.” Sam went peacefully.
“Creeping Socialism!” Chuck shouted after they left. “Government intervention! If they make that hair restorer a government project—hell, what can you expect after twenty years of the Re-Deal?”
“Now who could Sam have had an engagement with?” Ruth mused.
The doorbell rang. This time Fate had a soft white hand.
“Oh, he’s not here!” Debbie exclaimed, fluttering in disappointment. “He was supposed to show me through a collection of ancient coins.”
“Goodbye,” Ruth said clammily, and shut the door behind Debbie after a good, hard shove. She turned to Chuck. “O.K. I was going to wait and watch you get lynched. But I want to get that woman off Sam’s neck. You draw up a contract and I’ll give you the correct formula for Sam’s hair restorer.”
“You mean all this time you’ve known it?”
“Not all this time. But I had a lot of time to myself last night. And it occurred to me that Sam must have a carbon copy of his manuscript, and I looked and there it was.”
“You go find some neighbors to witness,” Chuck said, “and I’ll do the writing.”
Sam was gone most of the day. He opened the door to find Debbie on the sofa and Ruth in the armchair, studiously ignoring each other.
“The President of the United States,” he announced, “will not go bald.”
“She won’t go away,” Ruth said.
“Why should I?” Debbie asked, smiling just for Sam.
“Because Full Head already has the formula,” Ruth volunteered. “You’re no longer needed.”
“Do you want me to go, Sam?”
“Now she wants your money,” Ruth said.
“What money? What is this? And where’s dinner?”
“I found the carbon copy of your manuscript and sold it to Chuck. And now I didn’t get rid of her after all.” Ruth could no longer; control herself. “You don’t love me any more,” she sobbed.
“Yes I do, dear.”
“Well, you won’t for long. Tell her to go away.”
“We mustn’t be impolite. What makes her think I have money?”
“I just told you. I sold your word to Full Head.”
“Just so Debbie wouldn’t come around? Not for money?”
“I had to sell it forsomething. But yes, I mostly wanted to get rid of Debbie.”
“Dear, that was very misguided of you, but underneath I think your motive was not monetary. Suppose I told you we weren’t going to make any money after all.”
“That would be wonderful” Ruth said. “That would solve all our problems.”
“What do you mean?” Debbie asked. Her ingenuous air began to thicken a little.
“I gave the correct translation of the Scythian formula to the American Government. You couldn’t sell it, anyway, Ruth. It’s common property. No copyrights back in 450 B.C., you know. All I did was translate it.”
“But Ruth’s got a contract!” Debbie cried.
“Won’t hold water, or whatever contracts hold. But don’t worry about your company, Debbie. I took care of Full Head. Chuck Bradford’s worked so hard over this. The United States Government is going to farm out production to Full Head. They just want to control cheap distribution overseas. As the President says, a head full of hair; is a heart full of good will.”
“No money?” Debbie asked.
“No money.”
“No Debbie,” said Debbie, and she was gone, like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face.
“Do I get any dinner?” Sam asked.
“Yes. But why ‘Lick a handful of moly’?”
“Some enzyme in human spit, I’m sure. But you boil it later so it’s perfectly sanitary. What do we have for—”
“Meatloaf again,” Ruth said happily. “I like meatloaf. You’re right. Money isn’t important. And Sam, I’m sorry that I sold the word, I hate to go above you.” Here the brown eyes lower fell. “Because, you see, I love you.”
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Rosel George Brown is a New Orleans faculty wife, and the newest addition to F&SF’s roster of writers-who-look-like-models. That she majored in Ancient Greek, and has a refreshingly uninhibited sense of humor is apparent in . . .
MERCEDES HAD PARTICULARLY PREserved her chastity, as her adenoids, out of intellectual conviction. The difference was that she had had an opportunity to
be rid of her adenoids. There was nothing conventional about Mercedes, for that matter. When other girls were out experimenting with hasheesh, and swimming naked in mixed groups, Mercedes reclined neurasthenically on her violet plush sofa, reading the Bifurcate Review. In her adenoidal way, she was a Humanist, a Classicist, and a Graecophile (in translation, of course). As a further refinement, she read only Victorian translations from the Greek, a matter of keeping in step with the avant-garde neo-Victorian revival.
When the doorbell chimed “Home Sweet Home,” Mercedes’ heart fluttered ominously. She was, she thought palely, so very delicate. She passed a small bottle of sal volatile under her nose, and placed an embroidered bookmark between the pages of her Aristophanes before closing it reluctantly. Such delightful humor! The fact that she actually didn’t get any of the jokes was of course because So Much Is Lost in Translation.
There was a discreet knock at the door and Thomas, in faultless butler’s attire, walked in carrying a silver salver. Mercedes frowned at Thomas’ creaking walk, conscious that she had been putting off the indelicate and really repulsive task of oiling him. Thomas, eyes shifting in embarrassment at his irrepressible squeaks, presented the salver on which rested, as usual, nothing.
“The gentleman” Thomas said with a rusty sniff, “said he had no card.”
“A man?” Mercedes asked rhetorically. “Very well. I guess you may show him in.” She moved to the red velvet, rose-carved chair where the tapestried bell-pull and a heavy bronze paperweight were near at hand.
Thomas opened the door to admit a fresh-faced young man that looked like one of her fathers graduate students.
“My name is Kim,” he said heartily, coming toward her with his hand extended. He stopped in midpassage and colored slightly as he looked around the room, and did a double-take on Mercedes’ horn-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in the Ivy League loincloth and high boots, mementoes of a year at Harvard. He lowered his green bag to the floor and looked longingly at the enormous Chinese scarf which clothed the piano so modestly. He abandoned the idea, sank down in the Eastlake loveseat opposite Mercedes, and began to pluck nervously at the antimacassar.
“I have come to see you,” he said in hushed tones, “about a matter of—er—extreme delicacy.”
Mercedes clutched her sal volatile convulsively. “Yes, Mr. . . .?”
“Kim,” he replied. “Oh, er, Mr. Brian. I have, of course, spoken to your father first.”
Mercedes flushed violently. She moved nearer the bell-pull and began to toy with the paperweight. “Mr. Brian . . . sir . . .” she began haltingly. “I don’t even know you. This matter of great delicacy—perhaps we had better speak of it at some more propitious moment. I am not too well, you know.” Mercedes placed her hand on her fluttering heart.
Kim, who hadn’t read a Victorian novel since English II, responded tactlessly. “You’re healthy as a horse. I’ve just been over your medical.”
His gross brutality shocked Mercedes out of her impending swoon. “What’s this all about? What did you talk to my father about?” Had this coarse, working class type man gone over her medical report before . . . whatever he had in mind? She shuddered and calculated the thrust necessary to carry the paperweight from her hand to his head.
“I’m one of Jack’s—ah—Mr. King’s graduate students. We’ve been engaged in an experiment of great importance. It’s so important, in fact, and so secret, that only two people in the world know about it—your father and myself. We have reached the stage now where we need a vie . . . ah . . . a volunteer to test our hypothesis.”
“And you’re asking me . . . my own father . . .” Mercedes covered her face with her hands, overcome by the Horror of the Situation. She felt exactly like—who was it? Oh, yes—Dr. Rappaccini’s daughter. She could feel the Forces of Evil closing in around her.
Kim took out a cigarette irritably, looked hopelessly for an ash tray and replaced the cigarette in his green bag. He leaned forward, right elbow on one knee, and grinned at Mercedes in the powerful, masculine way most women found irresistible.
“Let me at least tell you what the experiment is. You can faint after I’m finished. We have, we think, perfected a time machine. It works by a method of “jump grooving” of instants, so that the subject is translated from one instant to another. In other words, if we send you back to, say, last Friday at three o’clock, the instant you arrive you create the existence you have come to observe, just as it actually was. Its not in reality, if I may use the term, the same, but its exactly alike. Only, so to speak, in another groove. Except for the paradox. You wouldn’t meet yourself, because you aren’t there until you are translated there and create the moment.”
But Mercedes wasn’t listening. Her head was thrown back, waiting for the guillotine to fall.
“Well, never mind the theory then. The point is, the machine is all built and we need someone to test it.”
“I understand,” Mercedes quivered. “It’s dangerous. No one would willingly risk their neck . . .”
“No, no. Not at all dangerous. Whether it works or not the machine itself is perfectly safe.”
“Then why me? Why not you? Or father? Or anyone at all except me?”
“For a very good reason. The machine requires three people, two to work it from this end, and the subject who travels. No one can work it but Jack and me. Anyone, of course, could be the traveler, but we’re afraid to get anyone else in on it. You were entirely Jack’s idea. It would keep the experiment in the family.”
Mercedes glowered at him and reached for the bell pull. “I wont go.”
“Wait!” Kim caught her hand. He gazed into her eyes with all the sincerity of three summers with the Little Theatre. “You’re a terribly attractive woman, you know.”
Mercedes let her hand fall. There was a certain brute honesty about the man.
Kim lit a cigarette and threw the match into the rose-patterned hand-stenciled sewing box. “For a woman of your taste and intelligence this offers an unparalleled opportunity. I imagine, just as an offhand guess, that you would enjoy a trip back to the time of King Victoria the Great.”
Mercedes winced.
Kim laughed at himself. “Queen, I mean, of course. Good Queen Victoria. For one of your temperament . . .”
“You misinterpret my character entirely,” Mercedes replied. It was her turn to lean forward interestedly. “I am, of course, a devotee and advocate of the neoVictorian revival, for reasons which someone of your class couldn’t possibly understand. My real interests, however, lie deeper. Much deeper. I am a Graecophile.” She paused triumphantly, expecting him at last to cower before the Grandeur of her Interests.
“You like Greeks?” he asked innocently.
“Ancient Greeks, you ninny,” she shouted and, like someone (probably Prometheus) suddenly released, she threw the paperweight. It missed him and demolished an innocent shepherdess. Recovering herself slightly, she tossed the heavy, leather bound, antiqued volume of Aristophanes in his lap. “That’s what I like. Intellectual wit. Real art. Classic refinement.”
“Naturally,” Kim said. He longed to pull off his loincloth to mop his sweaty brow, but some instinct told him this would not be de rigeur. “We can easily send you back to ancient Greece. You’ll go?”
“Of course I’ll go. But then,” she said regretfully, “there’s the matter of the language barrier. I wouldn’t be able to understand a word, or ask for a glass of water or where the ladies’ . . . come to think of it, there might be many complications.”
But Kim was on his feet. “Come,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s go right now. No use torturing yourself with these doubts. Surely a woman of your Intelligence and Refinement will find a welcome niche in ancient Greek society. The language is the least problem. We’ve got a logophone right in the study and you can take it with you. You won’t just get a translation in time—you’ll also understand and speak the language as if it were your own.”
When Mercedes materialized in
the front row of the Athenian Theatre of Dionysus in the year 416 B.C., dining the Greater Dionysia and specifically during the performance of Aristophanes’ Frogs, she immediately turned on her logophone.
The first thing she heard was an incredibly crude noise, apparently made by one of the actors. “Static,” she thought and blushed anyhow. The crowds about her were roaring with laughter and watching the stage.
The next several lines of dialogue caused Mercedes to turn off her logophone in sheer horror. The flow of obscenity mercifully became a meaningless babble.
She leaned forward myopically to get a better view of the stage because she had forgotten her glasses. This was the flower of Greek drama. The actors were dressed very oddly. They carried the strangest looking objects. Almost like totem poles—no, they reminded her of something else. Something—unmentionable.
Huffily arranging the folds of her indignation about her, Mercedes rose to leave.
She made her way up the tiered rows of seats and out onto the slope of the hill. She stood awhile in pensive thought, nursing her disillusion and wishing fervently she had chosen the Lake Poets instead of Aristophanes.
Well, Aristophanes was all washed up as far as she was concerned. But then, this was an age full of great names. There were people she should meet and talk to, if she could think of the names. Her mind ground ponderously through Greek Literature in Translation. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—and of course people like Pericles and—well, others. And why were they all men? There must have been some women.
Aspasia—ah, yes. The wise Aspasia, companion to the noble Pericles and center of a brilliant salon. Anyone, Mercedes was sure, would be able to point her out.
As these thoughts flashed upon her inward eye people began to surge out of the theatre. Mercedes turned on her logophone and approached a thinly veiled young woman who was heavily made up and seemed to be chewing vigorously on something.
“Sure, honey,” the girl answered with comradely spirit. “Everybody knows old Aspasia. Come on, I’ll point her out.” The girl began to lead Mercedes toward the other side of the theatre. She stopped, finally, and eyed Mercedes curiously. “You from Crete, honey?”
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