“Quiz-show,” Frost managed at last, his words now as thick and heavy as doom itself.
Chapter XVII
THIS STUDIO-AUDITORIUM is quite large and, as such places go, comfortable enough.
Dr. Eichner and Frost were admitted without difficulty and took two of the few remaining seats near the back. The studio audience was at capacity and in a gala mood; apparently, some phase of the entertainment was already under way. On stage, or rather, in the studio proper—situated dead ahead on a slightly higher level than the audience, and weighted to the right by the glassed control-booth—obvious last-minute preparations were at hand. Five heavy chairs at a large forum-table was the center of things, while all around them great cameras and microphones were being shifted and given final adjustment by men in shirt sleeves. At the table, each place was set with an ashtray, a drinking glass, and a small decanter of water, which were checked and rearranged from time to time.
The audience, meanwhile, was not idle but engaged in clamorous exchange with a well-dressed young man standing at a microphone near the first row of seats on the left. He encouraged their response by laughing a great deal and leaning forward with broad winks and grimaces. He spoke in an unusually loud voice, almost shouting.
“Say, I think we’re going to have a lot of fun here tonight! Come to think of it, we always have a lot of fun here, don’t we?”
He beamed fanatically and cupped one hand to his ear in an exaggerated attempt to hear the audience’s reply.
“Yes!” they cried.
“I mean, DON’T WE?”
“YES!”
At this, Dr. Eichner, who had been unobtrusively scanning the rows ahead for a sight of Treevly, sat bolt upright in his chair, stunned and confused by the roaring crowd. He was on the verge of appealing to Frost when, suddenly he caught sight of Treevly, sitting at the end of a row very near the front. The Doctor immediately reached into the inside pocket of his coat to withdraw a small pair of binoculars, Zeiss 6 x 15, and proceeded, without being unduly conspicuous, to train them in Treevly’s direction where, as he saw, the two friends maintained a spirited commentary, nudging one another, and nodding in turn with approving laughs toward the young man at the microphone. With each audience response, Treevly would cup both hands to his mouth, and apparently join in at the top of his voice, while his companion watched him with evident admiration, glancing around animatedly from moment to moment to get the reaction of those nearby. Then Treevly would face him again and the two of them would laugh riotously, exchanging looks of merriment with their neighbors. It was obvious that the pair were great favorites at the studio.
Dr. Eichner continued to scrutinize them through his glasses, making several side remarks to Frost without turning his head—so that he failed to notice the glazed lethargy that had come over the latter, slumped forward in his chair eyes seemingly focused on the back of the person in front of him. However, just as the Doctor was about to force the glasses on Frost, a loud buzzing resounded through the Studio, signifying that the program would be on the air immediately. The young man at the microphone dramatically raised his hands, so that the show opened on a sea of hushed titters and coughings. Then he did a spectacular, backward-somersault terminating in a French split, at which the audience roared, and turning around he presented the host, a rotund, proudly self-effacing man who came striding jovially on stage at that instant.
The program, as it developed, was a popular radio and TV quiz-show, called “What’s My Disease?” and the host, who served as moderator to the panel, introduced its four members as they ceremoniously entered and took up their places at the table: a prominent woman columnist, a professional football coach, an actress, and a professor of Logic from the University of Chicago. The panel members were good-naturedly jibed by the moderator, and they smiled a great deal in return. They seldom looked directly at the audience, but rather at the moderator who assured their constant liaison with the audience by continually turning his glance from them to the panel members and back again, always with a show of serious goodwill.
After a moment’s distraction, Dr. Eichner re-trained his glasses on Treevly, and was only vaguely aware of the other developments going forward as the moderator took his place at the end of the table and the first contestant was brought in. The contestant could not be seen, but was wheeled in, completely obscured in a sort of raised, shrouded cage.
“Can you speak?” asked the moderator.
“Yes,” was the muted reply.
“All right, panel.”
The first questions proceeded rapidly, suggesting, by their tone a tediously familiar pattern.
“Local or general?” asked the football coach.
“Local.”
“Manifestations visible?” asked the woman columnist.
“Oh, yes.”
“Is it—your face?” asked the actress, taking a flyer.
“No.”
A buzzer sounded, tabulating the error and the moderator made some note of it on his pad and threw a significant glance at the audience. The audience reaction was mixed—a sigh of relief that it wasn’t the face mingled with disappointment that the actress, apparently the darling of the panel, had been wrong. She, in her turn, seemed good-naturedly abashed, even blushing a little.
“Are these manifestations,” began the Professor, raising his voice to be heard, “above, or below, the waist-line?”
“Below.”
“Is it of the limbs?” he continued.
The answer was hesitant. “—Yes.”
“A single limb?” the Professor hurried, hard on the scent of it now, as the moderator beamed knowingly and the rest of the panel began to smile in anticipation.
“Yes.”
“Is it elephantiasis?” demanded the Professor.
“Yes.”
The moderator took up the triumph quickly, and with grand good humor. “Yes, it IS elephantiasis!” and at that moment, as the shroud was dropped and the contestant revealed to them all, the audience took in its breath as one in a great audible gasp of astonished horror, and then burst into applause for the Professor, the contestant, the moderator, and the whole panel, while the latter exchanged informal congratulatory gestures all around, the actress especially animated in showing her modest appreciation of their victory.
“What’s going on here?” demanded Dr. Eichner, suddenly irate, of Frost, as the questioning of the second contestant moved under way. Frost, however, sitting like the leaning Buddha he resembled, seemed now to have lost consciousness, though his eyes remained partially open and he was in no apparent danger of falling off the chair. The Doctor turned his glasses onto the panel and scrutinized the proceedings there, muttering inaudible asides as the questions and answers went forward:
“Is your condition local, or general?”
“General.”
“Are the manifestations of this condition visible?”
“And how!”
This brought a laugh from the audience, and tolerant smiles from some of the panel. The actress, however whose turn it was, remained darkly serious. “Is it your face—” she began, but was brought up short by the woman columnist who reminded her with quiet firmness: “General.”
“Oh, yes, well, it wouldn’t be that then—thank goodness!” and she turned a winning smile to the audience, who murmured accord. Then she seemed at a loss for the moment.
“Can you talk?” she blurted.
“Well—”
The audience roared, but with forgiving good nature.
“No, I mean, can you walk?”
“Oh, yes.”
The actress gave a sigh of relief and let the questioning pass on.
“Is there pain . . . generally?” asked the football coach, raising one eyebrow.
“No-oo.”
“Is this a progressive condition?” demanded the Professor.
“Well, yes,” said the voice uncertainly.
Dr. Eichner tried to rouse Frost. “This is fantastic!” he said.
“Come to your senses, Frost!” He grasped the great man’s arm, but Frost’s mind could not be reached. People around them began to shush the Doctor. He looked at them in astonishment, then returned to scrutinize the panel with his glasses.
Meanwhile, things were coming to a head on stage.
“You did say ‘scales’?”
“Yes.”
A murmur of consternation in the audience.
“Is it Ichthyosis?” ventured the woman columnist.
“Yes!”
“Yes, it IS Ichthyosis!”
The covering was removed with a flourish, and the crowd gave their customary gasp of repulsion, and then burst into applause.
On the wall behind the panel, like a backdrop for a stage of players, was a large board of multi-colored lights depicting the human body’s interior. This board was evidently connected with an electric audio-response device, so that the lights reacted to sound—blinking and brightening as the volume and rapidity of speech, laughter, whistling, etc. increased in the studio. As the questioning became faster and more enthusiastic, the anatomy of lights would intensify, becoming brighter and brighter, until, after making a peculiar wavering glow when the audience took in its breath at the unveiling of the contestant, it would flash into climax with their final burst of applause, shuddering and raging with intolerable brightness for fully half a minute. Then it would die down and glow, faintly pulsating at each question and response as they got under way again, to build once more to the very end.
“Goiter-colussi?”
“No. No, it isn’t Goiter-col—”
“Multiple-Goiter!”
“Multiple-Goiter . . . it is! It is Multiple-Goiter!”
“Ooooooooooooooooooooh!”
And as the crowd abandoned itself to cheering applause, the board of lights burned and throbbed as though they had been short-circuited. The strange radiance of color and refraction given off by the board caused the faces in the audience to appear separately stark and isolate, and often rather distorted.
“It isn’t . . . . . . . . Giant Measle?”
“Yes! It is! It’s GIANT MEASLE!”
“Bah,” shuddered the Doctor angrily; he began to scan the audience with his glasses. “I’m clearing out, Frost,” he said in a terse shout. “Keep your man covered and contact me—back at the Mayfair.” So saying he stalked unsteadily out of the Studio, waving aside the protests of the door-guard, and leaving behind Frost, whose face now reminded one somehow of nothing so much as cold, polished stone.
Chapter XVIII
RALPH AND BABS had settled more or less comfortably in the convertible at a huge drive-in theater, and now Ralph was preparing two whiskey-and-cokes into paper cups he had just produced from the glove compartment.
“Be prepared, that’s our motto,” said Babs brightly. The darling girl was beaming; Ralph had suggested that after the film they go to Monsieur Croque, a dapper supper-club on Sunset Strip. And, for the occasion, Babs had worn her smartest black shantung, simple but not severe, a clever dress with a thin, gleaming line of pink-pearl buttons that parted her breasts like a smoldering arrow. Her hair was caught back with two small combs, leaving a vibrant white length of throat, which she managed to arch with becoming defiance, feeling the pulse of it beneath stretched sinews. At first glance, on the fleeting instants when her face was in repose, she might have resembled the ingenue of some deadly-chic Lesbian set, but under this polished veneer the girl felt herself all vulnerably rounded warmths of satin and lace.
“Well, here’s to it,” she said, looking mischievous as she raised her cup.
“Here’s to the ladies,” Ralph countered, “—bottoms up!”
Babs made a face of disapproval, first in mock reprimand to shame Ralph’s toast, and then in earnest distaste for the drink in her hand.
“Uh-uh,” she said significantly, shaking her head and returning the almost full cup. “No, thank you! More coke for me, please.”
Ralph posed a look of quizzical reproach at her as he added more coke to the cup, while Babs, in her turn, seemed to withdraw genteelly toward her side of the car and, as though she might be placing the boy on probation, actually started looking at the distant screen, where, at the moment, a two-weeks old newsreel was on view. While they sat in relative silence—for Ralph had shut down the small amplifier the attendant had attached to their window—as one of hundreds of couples, each housed separately dark within the vast parking lot, seeing the stale, mute heartbreaks of world news, it gradually started raining.
Ralph rolled his window part way up and, seeing that Babs was having difficulty with hers, leaned over to help her, kissing her lightly on the temple as he did.
“Oh, it’s going to rain!” said Babs crossly, unmoved by his attention. “And I didn’t bring a scarf! Oh, how awful!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Ralph, “maybe it will be nice.” He cheerfully made some adjustments inside the car, touching the cloth top here and there, and closing the hood ventilator. He turned on the radio and found some soft music, while Babs looked on hopelessly. Under the varying refractions of light from the screen and the radio dial, her still face did like a marvelously sculptured thing in certain half-lights, taking on qualities of beauty that were at once permanent and elusive; and her eyes seemed to contain little pieces of fire.
“But I don’t have anything,” she announced, “for my head!”
Now, in the cloth top above Babs there was a small hole, and before Ralph could take up her last complaint, drops of water began falling on the girl, and it soon became apparent that there was nothing for it but to get at once into the back seat. Ralph made an opening between the seats by pulling his own forward toward the steering wheel, and when Babs—cautious in attempting to negotiate it with the drink in her hand—started to hand the cup to him, he quickly urged her to finish it up, which could have, as an emergency measure, seemed feasible enough, for the boy had both hands occupied himself—one pulling back the seat, the other holding his own cup—and so, she did it. She downed it in one grimaced-draft, but seemed quite pleased and happy with herself at once, as though it were, under the circumstances, a justifiable lark. And a minute later they were snugly together in the back seat, where everything was darker and somehow suggestive of absolute seclusion; and, as Ralph prepared their drinks again, Wuthering Heights opened on the far screen ahead, its images broken, like those in a dream, by the rivulets of rain that cut a patternless crisscross over the windshield, while much closer at hand, the soft-glowing radio played “Mood Indigo.”
“Do you like to dance?” asked Ralph, ignoring the film.
“Um. Love it,” said Babs softly, looking straight ahead.
He took her hand and held it gingerly. She seemed to accept this as part of seeing the movie, but then she looked at him once, briefly, smiling some sort of insinuating reproach, and nodded toward the screen.
Ralph, his eyes never leaving her face, put his other arm on the seat behind her and, in a moment, leaned over to kiss her mouth, but the girl turned away and drew back a little, so he kissed her cheek instead, which she allowed him to do, lightly. “I love you,” he said tenderly, and she turned her great eyes toward him with their expression of slow amazement.
And when Ralph looked into the eyes it was almost lovingly. Then, with violent abruptness, he dropped his arm around her shoulders like a vise and pulled the girl to him, taking her chin in his left hand and kissing her mouth so hard and surely that she could only whimper through clenched teeth. Babs struck out in genuine terror at the hand holding her face, but Ralph, using the arm that encircled her, seized the defending hand from behind and held it fast by the wrist.
By the sudden initial movement, Ralph had pinioned the girl’s left arm between them, so that; with both arms restrained and her face held tightly, Babs was utterly helpless. Her mouth went vibrantly rigid beneath his and her whole frame shuddered against him like someone convulsing in a straight-jacket: she was able to do nothing but writhe and
kick with her knees, which she did, in savage desperation, but only for a moment, then she fell limp in hopeless exhaustion as the boy kissed her long and hard, moving his mouth around over hers, probingly, working his fingers into her cheeks, trying to unlock the teeth, as one might to give a kitten medicine.
Ralph’s right arm was around Babs’ neck and shoulders and with that hand he held her own right back by the wrist, holding it next to her head while, with the fingers he fondled her ear and hair-line. But she would not part the teeth, and yet her eyes were closed now—almost serenely it would seem—which Ralph, no doubt, may have taken as a good sign, for he pursued the kiss with relentless, mounting fervor, biting her lips gently the while, until at last, with a great near-tearful sigh, she did yield, and more, opening her mouth to him fully, as he, in turn, relaxed his grip on her wrist, and then, in confidence, released it, and the girl unhesitatingly threw that arm around his neck, thrusting herself to him, as if with a so much fiercer need than his own, that he at once dropped his other hand from her face to her nearest breast. Babs twisted her face sharply away, at the same time withdrawing her arm from around him to grasp the terrible hand.
“Please,” she begged and turned to look at the boy imploringly, but he immediately regained the former advantage, seizing her face and hand, kissing her mouth deeply for a full minute, and when she responded this time and he lowered his hand to her blouse, he did not release the wrist, and the only thing she could do was tear her mouth from him again.
“Ralph, please. Please. You’re hurting my arm!” She sounded on the verge of panic and tears, and—her face being turned away—the boy kissed her neck and ears, whispering mournfully, “Babs, I love you so,” undoing, as he spoke, the central six buttons of her blouse, wherein he entered his hand caressingly.
“No. No, no,” she pleaded, and the convulsions began anew, struggling to get her impossible left arm from between them, accompanied by fearful sobs now that her mouth was uncovered. But Ralph held fast, and by gradually closing the arm that encircled her, brought her head toward his own, and managed to slowly turn the face with her own hand, which as we know, he held vise-like at the wrist against her cheek. Babs exerted her fullest to prevent this, and, for a moment, actually seemed to forget her anxiety in the sheer contest of physical power it appeared to be—appeared, because the boy managed it so slowly, as though strategically prolonging the drain of strength and energy as might otherwise stand her in good stead at the later, more crucial stages of thwarting their love. During this tedious maneuver, of narrowing the space between their heads, Babs’ face contorted grotesquely with strains and grimaces of hopeful effort, but for the last few inches it became all hushed and closed-eyed again, as, in the illusion of having had a chance, she had once more exhausted herself completely, and honorably lost, was again buried in kisses.
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