Selected Stories of Alfred Bester

by Alfred Bester

  She began to sob again. She felt her way around the couch and sat down, despairing. When at last the convulsion spent itself she wiped her eyes courageously, determined to face reality. She was no coward.

  But when she opened her eyes she was shocked by another bombshell. She saw her familiar room in tones of gray. She saw Blaise Skiaki standing in the open door smiling at her.

  “Blaise?” she whispered.

  “The name is Wish, my dear. Mr. Wish. What’s yours?”

  “Blaise, for God’s sake, not me! Not me. I left no death-wish trail.”

  “What’s your name, my dear? We’ve met before?”

  “Gretchen,” she screamed. “I’m Gretchen Nunn and I have no death-wish.”

  “Nice meeting you again, Gretchen,” he said in glassy tones, smiling the glassy smile of Mr. Wish. He took two steps toward her. She jumped up and ran behind the couch.

  “Blaise, listen to me. You are not Mr. Wish. There is no Mr. Wish. You are Dr.Blaise Skiaki , a famous scientist. You are chief chemist at CCC and have created many wonderful perfumes.”

  He took another step toward her, unwinding the scarf he wore around his neck.

  “Blaise, I’m Gretchen. We’ve been lovers for two months. You must remember. Try to remember. You told me about my eyes tonight… being blind. You must remember that.”

  He smiled and whirled the scarf into a cord.

  “Blaise, you’re suffering from fugue. A blackout. A change of psyche. This isn’t the real you. It’s another creature driven by a pheromone. But I left no pheromone trail. I couldn’t. I’ve never wanted to die.”

  “Yes, you do, my dear. Only happy to grant your wish. That’s why I’m called Mr. Wish.”

  She squealed like a trapped rat and began darting and dodging while he closed in on her. She feinted him to one side, twisted to the other with a clear chance of getting out the door ahead of him, only to crash into three grinning goons standing shoulder to shoulder. They grabbed and held her.

  Mr. Wish did not know that he also left a pheromone trail. It was a pheromone trail of murder.

  “Oh, it’s you again,” Mr. Wish sniffed.

  “Hey, old buddy-boy, got a looker this time, huh?”

  “And loaded. Dig this layout”

  “Great. Makes up for the last three which was nothin’. Thanks, buddy-boy. You can go home now.”

  “Why don’t I ever get to kill one?” Mr. Wish exclaimed petulantly.

  “Now, now. No sulks. We got to protect our bird dog. You lead. We follow and do the rest.”

  “And if anything goes wrong, you’re the setup,” one of the goons giggled.

  “Go home, buddy-boy. The rest is ours. No arguments. We already explained the standoff to you. We know who you are but you don’t know who we are.”

  “I know who I am,” Mr. Wish said with dignity. “I am Mr. Wish and I still think I have the right to kill at least one.”

  “All right, all right. Next time. That’s a promise. Now blow.”

  As Mr. Wish exited resentfully, they ripped Gretchen naked and let out a huge wow when they saw the five-carat diamond in her navel. Mr. Wish turned and saw its scintillation too. “But that’s mine,” he said in a confused voice. “That’s only for my eyes. I—Gretchen said she would never—” Abruptly Dr. Blaise Skiaki spoke in a tone accustomed to command: “Gretchen, what the hell are you doing here? What’s this place? Who are these creatures? What’s going on?”

  When the police arrived they found three dead bodies and a composed Gretchen Nunn sitting with a laser pistol in her lap. She told a perfectly coherent story of forcible entry, an attempt at armed rape and robbery, and how she was constrained to meet force with force. There were a few loopholes in her account. The bodies were not armed, but if the men had said they were armed Miss Nunn, of course, would have believed them. The three were somewhat battered, but goons were always fighting. Miss Nunn was commended for her courage and cooperation.

  After her final report to the Chairman (which was not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth) Miss Nunn received her check and went directly to the perfume laboratory, which she entered without warning. Dr. Skiaki was doing strange and mysterious things with pipettes, flasks and reagent bottles.

  Without turning he ordered, “Out. Out. Out.”

  “Good morning, Dr. Skiaki .”

  He turned, displaying a mauled face and black eyes, and smiled. “Well, well, well. The famous Gretchen Nunn, I presume. Voted Person of the Year three times in succession.”

  “No, sir. People from my class don’t have last names.”

  “Knock off the sir bit.”

  “Yes s—Mr. Wish.”

  “Oi!” He winced. “Don’t remind me of that incredible insanity. How did everything go with the Chairman?”

  “I snowed him. You’re off the hook.”

  “Maybe I’m off his hook but not my own. I was seriously thinking of having myself committed this morning.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “Well, I got involved in this patchouli synthesis and sort of forgot.”

  She laughed. “You don’t have to worry. You’re saved.”

  “You mean cured?”

  “No, Blaise . Not any more than I’m cured of my blindness. But we’re both saved because we’re aware. We can cope now.”

  He nodded slowly but not happily.

  “So what are you going to do today?” she asked cheerfully.

  “Struggle with patchouli?”

  “No,” he said gloomily. “I’m still in one hell of a shock. I think I’ll take the day off.”

  “Perfect. Bring two dinners.”

  * * *

  And 3 1/2 To Go

  Sociologists have never agreed on whether societies through the ages have demanded conformity because they think the status quo is perfection, or believe that the majority, ipso facto, must be the yardstick – in which case we should make way for the insects – or because they resent extraordinary talents which produce extraordinary results and sometimes strange behavior.

  There have been so many of these singular sports, perhaps multitudes of mutations through the millennia, who were forced to conceal their unique powers from mob hostility or else run for cover like hunted animals. This is the story of a batch who took off singing:

  One for the money,

  Two for the show.

  F# – E – A – 2# – D,

  And 31/2 to go!

  Patience. All will be made clear shortly.

  These marvels or misfits, depending on your point of view, banded together and roamed the known universe, peddling their talents. They knew they could never settle down anywhere unless they concealed their faculties and conformed, something none was willing to, or even could, do. They were sometimes called “The Wandering Blues” and other times “The Blue Devils,” again depending on the point of view. Word about them got around.

  There’s no doubt that they were often a curious blue when they emerged from their ship to sell their genius on some boondock planet or satellite. Long hauls through space forced them to conserve oxygen at the minimal survival level, turning them cyanotic. They recovered normal color if the new environment was hospitable, which, occasionally, it was most emphatically not. The same was true of their social reception now and then, forcing them to cut and run. They were, well, unusual.

  Van Ryn, for instance, was a magnificent artist. (He was born Sam Katz but that’s a hell of a name for a fashionable painter.) Rynny was astigmatic. There was a distortion in the lenses of his eyes that caused rays of light from an external point to converge unequally and form warped images. This is the common-or-garden-variety of astigmatism that afflicted El Greco and caused him to paint elongated faces and figures. The sixteenth century hadn’t yet got around to prescription glasses.

  What was strange about Rynny’s astigmatism was the fact that some of the external point sources of light were far in the future of whatever or whoever he was painting, and h
e got mixed up. He didn’t know what to believe so he settled for painting anything he saw, sometimes the present, more often the future. The twenty-fifth century hadn’t yet got around to prescribing for anything as bizarre as that.

  Clients got sore as hell at being depicted as decrepit ancients or embalmed corpses in the coffin (one was portrayed as a suicide hanging by the neck from a flagpole) and naturally refused to pay. But when Rynny was commissioned to paint the chateau of a royal mistress and produced a bijou of her in the garden of the same, flagrante with another lover, that was the end. He had to leave, quickly.

  Hertzing Matilda was a composer. He came from New South Wales, hence the odd play on the famous Aussie tune, “Waltzing Matilda,” which gave him the girl part of his nickname. He was a brilliant musician, a genius in fact, but born with a deformity in his ears which gave him the front part of his name.

  You see, all of us hear the audio-frequency band from around 30 Hz to 15,000 Hz. “Hz” is the abbreviation for “hertz,” the symbol for Rudolph Hertz (1857-1894). The infrasonic lies below 30 Hz, the ultrasonic is above 15,000 Hz, and only a few rare creatures can sense them, humans not among them.

  Well, as Hertzing Matilda grew older, he and the rest of the world thought he was going deaf. By the time he was thirty he seemed to be stone deaf, a tragedy for a composer, and is showed in his music, for, like Beethoven, he went on composing. But his work got crazier and crazier until it was so far out that he was run out of the business. Nobody could read his scores, which looked like paradigms in symbolic logic, as in the third line of the “One for the money” jingle, which he arranged.

  It was a skilled audiologist who discovered what had really happened to Hertz. He hadn’t gone deaf. His hearing had shifted from the normal audio-frequency band up into the ultrasonic, higher and higher. He was sensing 30,000, 40,000, and 50,000 hertz and trying to translate the outré hyperworld he heard into conventional music, which was like trying to divide apples by pears. The audiologist’s paper on the discovery created a sensation in the medical journals, but all it earned for Hertz was his nickname.

  Fay Damien had been an actress. She was most attractive without being pretty, sweet, warm, appealing to the public, cooperative, and hardworking with her colleagues. She had everything going for her except the one kink that ruined all chances for success; she was a jinx.

  Wherever she went, bad luck was sure to follow; props failed, sets collapsed, lights exploded and fell on heads, cameras jammed. Everybody was afraid to work with this hoodoo and stars flatly refused. The end came when a producer took her along to dine with a new potential backer and help coax him into putting up front money for a new series. The backer’s wife suddenly appeared at the table and shot him dead. Out of the blue it had occurred to her that he and Fay were having an affair.

  All this was a mystery to Ms. Damien until she happened to meet Hertzing Matilda at an audition where they were both desperately trying to get work. They’d heard of each other but never met. They chatted and exchanged sympathy for their perplexing problems – Hertz had trained himself to read lips and body language – when suddenly he cocked an ear, then winked and said in the strange singsong tones imposed by his ultrasonic handicap, “It’s all right. He says to tell you not to worry. He likes me.”

  “What? He? Who?”

  “Your brother.” Hertz grinned. “He says were a pair of fruitcakes and ought to stick together.”

  Fay was bewildered. “What brother? I haven’t got a brother.”

  “Sure you do. Inside.”

  “Inside? Inside where?”

  “Inside you.”

  “Are you saying I’ve got a brother inside me and you’re talking to him?”

  “Uh-huh. Ultrasonics.”

  Fay burst out laughing. “This is a brand-new come-on and I’d love to fall for it. God knows, most men on the make are so damn unoriginal.”

  “I’m not on the make; this is straight. You’ve got your brother Morgan inside you. Didn’t you know?”

  She didn’t, and for an interesting reason. When Mama Damien discovered she was expecting she resolved that, boy or girl, she’d name the baby Morgan. If a boy, after Sir Henry Morgan, the bold buccaneer, because she wanted him to be piratical, devil-may-care, and successful in a cutthroat world. If a girl, after Morgan le Fay, the fairy sister of King Arthur, because she wanted her to enchant and captivate the whole world. Mama was devoted to romantic literature.

  Well, fraternal twins developed, brother and sister, which is not unique; it’s simply a case of two fertilized ova. Only in this gestation the sister embryo outgrew the brother embryo, quite by accident, engulfed him and incorporated him into herself as a fraternal cyst. This is most unusual but, again, not unique.

  What was unique was the fact that Morgan, the enclosed brother, was alive. And Morgan was not only piratical, he was also a witch, a living, fraternal devil-cyst with a will and ideas of his own. He was Fay’s jinx because he had a hot temper and the most trivial things could sting him into casting malevolent spells. The backer’s table conversation had annoyed him, hence the murdering wife. Morgan was the invisible, unpredictable “half” in the jingle and his motto was, Incipere multost quam impetrare facilius.

  IT’S MUCH EASIER TO BEGIN A THING THAN TO FINISH IT

  * * *

  The Devil Without Glasses

  Sleep is a preview of death; and as all men must die in the end, all men taste that death in sleep each night, a tiny bitter fragment.

  It happens to all of us. First there is night and darkness. We lie in bed, tired and relaxing, welcoming our portion of death because we know there will be an awakening. We think a little, reviewing the events of the day, drowse, settle into the pillow.

  The queer lights that flash in our closed eyes dance in familiar gyrations, and as we try to follow them we topple over the brink into the anesthesia of slumber. Eventually we dream. It has been suggested that dreaming is nature’s device to clear the mind and ready it for the next day’s turmoils and crises. Perhaps.

  There is sound that matches the gyrating lights we watched as we fell asleep. There is space that is far from empty, it swarms with atomic and subatomic particles. And most difficult to comprehend, there are two spaces, obverse and reverse, like the faces of a coin. From one of these come voices that sound alien. There is an identity calling himself Starr, speaking in muffled, distorted tones, “Charles. Charles Granville.” The words shatter into filigree. “Clear transmission, please. There is reverse interference.”

  The blurring distorts, then clears.

  “Granville. Charles Granville. Can you hear me?” The identity called Starr pauses. “Will some of you get him to listen.”

  “No response?”

  “None. He’s the rare type who cannot commit himself to anything because he cannot believe in a reality which exists independent of the ideas concerning it. D so he hangs midway between obverse and reverse.”

  “Then why bother with him? Let him hang.”

  “Because he has thirty years of frenzy, of the violent excitement of mania buried deep inside him. When it emerges, as it must sooner or later, he will begin to preach, but for or against our obverse universe? We must persuade him.”

  “Granville, you must listen to us. You must listen and act as instructed. You are unique because you are unaware of your hidden potential.”

  In the dream labyrinth Charles Granville listens indifferently to the voices pecking at his mind. “I beg your pardon. Most amazing thing. Did someone mention my name? I’m Granville. Dr. Charles Granville.” He giggles insipidly at a pointless dream joke. “Wanted in surgery to diagnose two-headed patient.”

  Starr persists, “You can’t hang between two spaces, Granville. Join us. Come to our obverse.”

  Steps falter through clotted mist and fog that sound like electricity. The voices call in living echoes, like articulate road signs. This is dizzy electric cream with goldfish that repeat your name.

  “But wh
y are the fish talking?” Granville considers the problem. “Swimming? That’s okay. In the nature of things. Quite right.” His mute voice sings without sound. “Fish got to swim. Birds got to fly. Swell idea for a song. I’m a real-life composer.”

  “He’s reaching for his own lunatic reality, Starr.”

  “It doesn’t matter if it gets him through to us. Will one of you check Coven for reverse interference?”

  In vasty deeps a bell beats slowly.

  “Do you hear that?”

  “The bell?”

  “Yes. It’s Coven.”

  Starr calls urgently, “Granville, this way. Stay with us in the obverse.”

  The bell beats faster, soaring upwards. The voices mount and blend. “Granville, listen to us. Don’t try to wake up. Hold on to your dream a little longer because your dream is your reality.”

  A hand shaking his shoulder.

  A single bell clattering.

  A single voice repeating, “Granville! Granville! Wake up, will you Charlie? That’s emergency you’re hearing.”

  Granville stirred in the clot, trying to plunge back into sleeping and dreaming his own reality. He muttered, “Keep the goldfish quiet.”

  The redheaded young man in T-shirt and white ducks exclaimed, “Jerusalem! I never saw a guy pound his ear like you, Charlie. That’s emergency hollering. This is county hospital. It’s your turn to ride the wagon. Will you wake up!”

  Granville opened his eyes to a bleak whitewashed dormitory room. “Okay, Gardner. The body is conscious.”

  “Try and look it.”

  “Kill that bell, will you? What time is it?”

  Gardner looked at him dubiously, then stepped to the wall switch and cut the bell circuit. “Six A.M.”

  “Six? Oh! Murder!”

  “No, auto accident. Corner of Broad and Grove. Come on. Come on. Get dressed. The wagon’s waiting. Get that epicene look off your face, Doctor.”