by Isaac Asimov
Just do one thing for me, will you? Quit grinning like that. That’s the way the damn cops grinned at me.
Will you quit it?
Pigeon
by William F. Nolan
When Vince Thompson entered his apartment, he saw the small white square of paper under the door.
Well, he thought, it’s about time. Been a month since the last one.
He locked the door behind him and unfolded the paper. It was like all the others: a phone number and the letter R typed at the bottom. Nothing else. Vince ignited the edge of the paper with his lighter and watched the number blacken and curl into ash. Then he dusted his fingers and reached for the phone.
“Vince?” R’s voice was cold and metallic over the wire.
“Yeah. I just got the message.”
“Ready to go to work?”
“Just fill me in.”
“It’s tonight. Top of Bel Air Road off Sunset. You follow it all the way up. To the left, at the summit, you’ll see a stretch of open ground. About a hundred feet in is a small white stucco house set into the hill with a two-car garage in front. You station yourself inside the garage. Door’s unlocked, so you’ll have no problem getting in. Your pigeon should arrive by eleven. You be there by 10:45 just in case.”
“Fine. What’s my boy look like?”
“Tall. Fairly slim build. Around forty or so.”
“This one for the usual?”
“Maybe more if the job’s real clean. We’ll see.”
“Anything else I need to know?”
“That’s it, Vince.” The voice clicked off.
Thompson replaced the receiver and leaned heavily back on the couch. He grinned to himself, thinking of a quick two grand for one night’s work. Wilma would be real pleased to get that coat he’d been promising her. Tomorrow night they’d celebrate, go dancing, drink some good champagne...
Vince lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs. R was sure some operator. Like a ghost. Nobody sees him, nobody knows who he is. As he’d told Mitch, Vince didn’t like the feeling you get working for a guy with no face. A square of white paper, a phone number, some orders, a dead man — and a couple of thousand bucks. No problems. No loose ends. But sometimes it made Vince jumpy. He’d been asking around, among some of the wise boys, but no one seemed to know anything. R was just a voice. Well, for the kind of dough Vince was getting he could keep his curiosity curbed. Actually, with R figuring all the angles, it was a perfect set-up.
Vince checked his watch: 9:30. He estimated a half hour to reach Bel Air, another ten minutes to the top. Which meant he still had time to stop downstairs for a couple of quick ones.
The place was packed. Full house for a Friday night. Vince managed to push his way to the bar. He ordered a scotch and water, and looked over the crowd.
Here I am, he thought, ready to kill a man tonight and it might even turn out to be one of you guys. He sipped his drink slowly.
How many jobs had he done for R? Ten? A dozen? It didn’t matter, really. To Vince Thompson, killing was a business and it was up to R to keep the books. A year ago, when he hit L.A. from Frisco, his old pal Mitch had put in the good word on him to R, and he was in.
His gaze swept the room once more. Jerks! Poor dumb jerks pushing trucks for a living or delivering milk or sweating over a desk in some seedy office. Hell, he’d make more tonight with one shot than these dummies would make in three months!
He finished his drink, had another.
When he left the bar, he felt just right: not high, but brought to a fine cutting edge. He knew he could handle the job without any trouble and be back at his apartment by midnight. He might even give Wilma a late buzz and tell her the news.
Just at the entrance to Bel Air Road, under the tall, wrought-iron gate off Sunset, Vince pulled his car to a stop. Nobody around, no other cars. Quickly he reached under the dash and unstrapped the slim Italian Beretta he always carried there. He flipped out the magazine, checked it, and eased the gun into his coat. He sighed, feeling whole once more.
One of the toughest rules Vince had to accept, when he started working for R, concerned the Beretta. None of R’s boys packed a gun before a job. That way, according to R, they were always clean if the cops picked them up between jobs. For Vince, the rule seemed all wrong. Without his Beretta he felt half-naked; he’d carried it since he was sixteen; he was never fully at ease without it.
Bel Air Road twisted up sharply past the rich hillside homes, and Vince felt the Merc slide a bit on the turns. He backed off. It was no use pushing it because the road was dark and narrow and he didn’t want to get tangled up with another car on the way down.
The climb was a steep one. At the top, he pulled the Merc far over on the dirt shoulder under some trees and cut the engine. His car would be out of sight here. Below him, stretching for miles, Vince could see the glittering lights of Beverly Hills and Hollywood.
He got out of the Merc and stretched. Chilly as hell up here, Vince thought, feeling the cold wind against his face. He looked around.
As usual, R had arranged a perfect set-up for the job. No other houses nearby, a long stretch of open ground between the garage and the road. If anybody heard the shot, it would sound like a car backfiring on the steep grade. Perfect.
Vince checked his watch again. 10:44. He’d better get moving. When he reached the garage, a low modern structure with a sliding door, he nodded. No lock, just as R had said. The door slid up quietly under his hand.
Inside, near the far corner, he saw several stacked cartons. Vince allowed the door to slide down behind him as he moved toward the boxes.
He eased down on the cool concrete, his back against the wall. When the door opened, his pigeon would make a perfect target against the lights of the car.
Minutes ticked by. A cigarette would be too risky, he knew, so he quit thinking about a smoke. He slipped the thin Beretta into his right hand, letting one finger curl slowly around the trigger. One shot. That’s all he needed to do the job. He’d earned a marksmanship medal in the service, and he’d had plenty of practice since. Plenty.
Vince Thompson stiffened at the sound of a car on the road below him. The high whine of the straining engine increased in volume. He eased forward, transferring his weight to the balls of his feet; the Beretta was up and ready.
He heard the car pull off the road and bump over the open stretch of ground.
His pigeon all right.
Vince pressed close against the stacked cartons, waiting. Outside, he heard a car door open, the dry scuff of shoes against the ground.
Any second now...
The garage door began to slide upward and Vince sighted along the Beretta’s thin barrel, ready to squeeze the trigger.
Vince swore, drawing in his breath sharply.
No one was there.
Just the bright cones of two powerful headlights in the open doorway.
Vince felt his mouth go dry and his heart begin to pound inside his chest. He squinted into the glare. Nothing.
Only the lights, the smooth sound of the car’s idling engine, and the wind.
Suddenly he was remembering the metallic voice of R: “Tall. Fairly slim build. Around forty or so.”
Which, Vince realized, was a thumbnail description of himself.
Sure, it all figured. His bitching about working for a faceless man, quizzing Mitch, nosing around the boys for information he didn’t really need...
He was becoming a risk — and R didn’t believe in risks.
Okay, then, Vince told himself, get the hell out of here. If you can reach the Merc you’ve got a chance. But first, fix those lights.
Two shots and the twin beams winked out in a soft shower of glass. In the thick darkness, he was up and running.
Ahead of him, the way seemed clear. He twisted past the car in front of the garage and struck out across ground, crouched low, the Beretta poised for action.
Then Vince Thompson went blind.
A d
ozen bright flashlight beams dipped up from the dark ground, slicing into his eyes.
God! They were all around him!
If anyone heard the sudden roar, it must have sounded like a car backfiring on the steep grade.
The Prisoner
by Edward Wellen
He absently brushed a few specks of dust from the desk but did not really feel in the mood to get down to work. He looked around the cluttered office. There was so much to do. And, God knew, he desperately wanted nothing to go wrong.
But on impulse he quietly — any sudden loud noise would bring a guard running — opened the bottom right drawer and took out his binoculars. The binoculars were a way of escape. He kept to one side of the window, out of sight of the guard he heard coughing and shifting below the window, and peered out beyond the gate.
It was just past dawn, and traffic was light in the streets outside his prison. He focused the binoculars. At the nearest intersection came the young paper boy riding his bike no-handedly. He could not hear, of course, but from the cant of the head he knew the boy was whistling or singing.
Suddenly a car shot into sight, taking the turn too swiftly, too sharply. It struck the bike, toppling the boy and his basket of papers. The car slammed to a shivering stop.
Instinctively he burned the license-plate number into his mind.
The driver’s door opened. The driver got out and with the exaggerated sobriety of the truly drunken walked back to the still form, looked down at it, then with a shock into true sobriety looked wildly around, hurried back into his seat, and drove off.
Watching it all, he himself felt a shock into something beyond sobriety. He should have recognized the car on sight, for he had seen it before, had more than once from this same window seen Pardee breeze by with the top down. And each time he had smiled a twisted smile knowing the thought that must have gone through Pardee’s mind as he passed by: by God, he was inside these walls of gray sandstone painted white and Pardee was outside.
He started guiltily from his trance, hearing the siren of an ambulance, nearing, nearing, then on the spot and moaning into silence. He had known instantly, by the terrible fling and the ragdoll fall, and by the mangled bike, that the boy was past saving. Still he felt thankful someone had quickly sent for help. It was now out of his hands.
Grimly he put back the binoculars and started to work. Someone else must have seen Pardee, just as someone else had seen the still form in the street and summoned the ambulance.
But no. As the day wore on, he managed to listen to the local news broadcasts and learned the police had no leads to the hit-and-run driver.
His mouth tightened. He could not remain silent. But it would be impossible for him to speak out. He thought wryly how much easier it would’ve been for him to identify Pardee. The man was someone he didn’t know.
He could not go into court and permit a clever defense lawyer to cross-examine him and make capital of the dislike he and Pardee had for each other.
“Isn’t it a fact that you and Mr. Pardee have been known to be enemies for years?”
He would have to say yes. It was the truth.
But even if he got off with merely giving a deposition, the shadow of suspicion would linger — more than a shadow, a stain — the suspicion that private spite had lurked behind public spirit.
He looked around in frustration at the walls that closed him in.
Then voices broke in on him, voices from the yard outside. He had forgotten. It was a Visitors Day.
The people passing in through the gate were usually a distraction, but now their hushed intensity was a convicing reminder of where he was.
He eyed the phones on the desk ruefully. One disguised call to the local police would suffice; but he could hardly make an anonymous call from here.
Then he had it. The least he could do — and the most — was to write an anonymous note. The time was now, while he thought of it and had this rare chance.
He stepped back to the desk, drew a piece of stationery toward him, stood leaning over it, and picked up a pen to begin. No. First things first. He took up a ruler, covered the letterhead, then lifted the bottom of the sheet to tear it off below the letterhead. But as he did so, light passed through the paper, outlining the watermark. He let the sheet fall flat. All the stationery on the desk bore that revealing letterhead and watermark.
The scratch pad. He took up the ballpoint pen again and printed his message painstakingly in characterless block letters. No one would ever find out he had written it or that it had come from within these walls.
But what now? Even if he found a plain envelope he would never be able to smuggle the letter out. He might manage to pass through the mail room, but how could he slip the envelope into the outgoing mail without someone noticing? He was always being watched.
Cross that bridge when he came to it. He was wasting time. He whirled his glance around the room and saw a book on a shelf in a plain dust wrapper. He grabbed the book and pulled. It was tightly wedged in and pulling it out caused a book alongside to fall to the floor.
The thump of the book on the carpet had an echoing thump in his heart. He waited frozen for a guard to rush in. No one came. He let out his breath slowly. The carpet had a deep pile and the thump had seemed louder to him than it really was.
He took off the dust wrapper and spread it out on the desk. He found a used envelope stuffed with some news clippings, dumped the clippings into the wastebasket, and pulled the side and bottom flaps of the envelope unstuck. Using the spreadeagled envelope as a pattern, he cut the dust wrapper to its shape and matched the folds. Now he had a plain envelope. He shoved the letter inside, sealed all the flaps with dabs from a small stick of glue, then printed an address on the envelope.
All that had taken only a few minutes. The group of visitors was off to one side still admiring the garden. Now to distract the guard under the window.
He tossed a pen — there were lots of pens — into a bush off to the right. The alert guard whipped around, reaching for his gun in the same motion, and headed for the bush.
Quickly now, while the guard’s back was turned. He sailed the envelope out to the left. He agonized over its flight — rather, its fall; watched it tilt and plummet like a broken-winged bird until a swirl of wind carried it out into the open near the path.
The guard came back to his post, shaking his head.
Time passed. The sky darkened. It was clouding up to rain, and rain would beat the address on the envelope into soggy illegibility. The guard had still not noticed it.
Then the man coming on to relieve the guard saw it and picked it up.
“What’s this?”
“Dunno. Let’s have a look.”
They frowned over the address.
“Guess one of the visitors left it there. I better take it right in.”
Listening to them he smiled. Then a thought struck him and he stepped quickly away from the window and went to the desk.
He could barely make out the shadow-edged imprint of his message on the top sheet of the scratch pad.
I WITNESSED THIS MORNING’S HIT-AND-RUN ACCIDENT BUT I CAn’t GET INVOLVED.
The message ended with the car’s license-plate number.
Hurriedly he tore off the top half-dozen sheets, made a spill of them, lit a match, and burned the sheets to char in the ashtray.
Just in time. There was a buzz. He pressed a switch.
“Yes?” he said, his voice calm.
“Sorry to break in on you, Mr. President, but something politically touchy has just come up—”
Politically touchy, yes. They had done a quick check on the license number. But no one — not even Senator Pardee — could reproach him for forwarding an anonymous letter to the Chief of Police for the District of Columbia.
The Sooey Pill
by Elaine Slater
It was the pill society. There was the morning-after pill, of course, which the government had made obligatory after the first child. Yet eve
n so, the population growth was alarming, and overcrowding was becoming desperate. Then there were the multitudes of tranquilizer pills in almost every color, size, and shape that helped one to cope with the tensions caused by the almost total lack of privacy, by the constant noise, polluted air, continual abrasive physical contact with crowds, and by the harsh and ugly sights of a superindustrialization devoid of trees or greenery of any kind.
Then there were the food pills. One took them three times a day. The endless wheatfields, pastures, grazing lands, and vegetable farms of former days had become ancient history. Even the Grand Canyon was now filled to overflowing with sweating humanity, jostling endlessly for living space. The food pills were processed in huge floating factories, and consisted of compressed algae and seaweed, and plankton. They had a sort of unpleasant fishy taste, but could be swallowed whole with a glass of desalinated water, and they provided all the nutriments necessary to go on living.
But the most important pill of all was affectionately called the Sooey pill. It was the only one that came in a lavender color with a stamp on it resembling a clenched fist. Every person was issued one of these on his or her twenty-first birthday. If one lost the Sooey, another would be issued — but only after much red tape; and, of course, one’s name was permanently placed on a “Suspects List,” to be consulted every time someone was murdered by misuse of the Sooey. These suspects automatically came under police surveillance and were questioned at great length, and one knew oneself to be at best a possible unwitting accessory to murder. For this reason, and others, people took great care not to lose their Sooeys.
Basically the entire society was built around the Sooey pill. It was not only the individual’s escape hatch, but society depended on it as a regulator in a world where nature’s own regulators seemed to have fused out, or gone haywire. There had been much talk — and the Radical Demopubs had actually tried to force through a bill to issue the Sooey pill at age thirteen or younger — of issuing the pill before childbearing age. It was a desperate measure, attempting to deal with a desperate situation. But the Demopubs were overruled by the conservative wing of their own party, who joined with the opposition in saying that it was an inhuman solution, and that the situation was not yet that desperate — an indication, some people muttered, in itself, of things to come.
