Robert appeared in the doorway and watched him as he threw the switch and warmed the machine. A few dials moved, and Robert stepped forward with his intelligent eyes to read them and glance down at the figures in his hand and nod. Arthur ignored him. He switched the machine off and stepped to the window to look at his watch; it was 7:43 a.m. He unstrapped the watch and handed it to Robert and went into the other room.
In the office he sat in Robert's chair by the window and looked out onto the courtyard. The girl, eighteen and brunette, had a class across the way at eight o'clock, and she always arrived early. Arthur always watched for her and when he saw her he diverted brown Robert's attention, so that he always missed seeing her. He had been doing that ever since he had seen Robert talking with her two months before.
Presently he saw her, walking quickly through the cold and up the steps to the courtyard. It was cold weather and she wore a heavy coat which concealed her figure—which was a good thing. Arthur knew how young men like cheekbone Robert liked the summer months on campus.
"What time you want to go?" he called out, and when Robert came into the room he did not look out the window.
"At eight," said Robert.
"You're sure?"
"Of course. I told you definitely yesterday, and I seldom change my mind."
"Well, you never know," said Arthur. "Something might have come up, might have changed your plans."
Robert smiled as though he were flexing his face muscles. "Nothing is likely to at this point. Except perhaps an act of God."
An act of God, Arthur repeated in his mind, wanting to look out the window to see if the girl was safely out of sight yet.
"There's someone at the door," he said.
Robert went to the door, but there was no one there and he went outside to look down the stairs. Arthur turned and looked for the girl. She had sat down on a bench by the door to her building and was paging through a book, her hair falling softly like water mist across her forehead. Even from this distance Arthur could see that it was clean, free hair, virgin's hair. He knew the way absent Robert would like to run his fingers through it, caressing the girl's neck, tightly, holding her …
Robert was dangerous. No one else realized that, but Arthur had watched young men on that campus for thirty-two years, and he recognized the look he so often saw in Robert's eyes. So many of them, students and young professors, had that look: veiled, covert, waxing and waning behind the eyes, steadily building up to an explosion like an— But Arthur did not want to think about that.
He had tried, once, to warn others about Robert, whose mind was a labyrinth of foggy, dark halls. He had told them, down in the main office, one day after hours. That had been the day he had seen dark Robert with the girl, seen them together. He had told Mr. Lewis' assistant and tried to warn her—fog Robert must be dismissed and sent away. But the woman had hardly listened to him, and as he had stood in the outer room on the way out, looking calmly at a chip in the baseboard, he had heard her speaking to Mr. Lewis, the president of the university. "We have to remember that Arthur is getting on in years," she had said. "He's probably having a little trouble with his memory, playing tricks on him. People who are getting on in years sometimes aren't very much in contact with reality." Mr. Lewis' assistant was a dull, gray woman.
"Robert Ernsohn is one of our most valued young men," Mr. Lewis had said. "We're backing his research as fully as possible, and we have every confidence in him." Arthur had heard some papers rustle and then silence, so he had stopped looking at the baseboard and gone out.
Not in contact with reality? Arthur had been watching the realities of young men and their eyes through all his years at the campus, first as a janitor, then later as an assistant in the chemistry labs and up in the small observatory on the top floor. He had seen them looking at the girls, light and rounded, long hair and tapered ankles and tight, swaying skirts. He knew about realities.
He had read about them, in books from the library's locked shelves. Case histories of sadists and murderers and twisted minds of all sorts. Men who cut girls straight up the belly, dissected their breasts, removed the organs of their abdomens and laid them out neatly on the floor, and then carefully washed what remained of their bodies and put their clothes back on them and went away. Arthur had read all those books carefully, and he knew what reality was. It was all around him and he was certainly in contact with it.
The door behind him opened and frowning, covert Robert came back into the room.
"There was no one," he said, and glanced at the watch and went into the laboratory where the machine was.
"It must be time," Arthur said, and followed him.
"Yes, it is," Robert said, sitting on the couch. Arthur pulled the scanner forward to where it rested directly above Robert's body and set the calibration exactly correctly. He activated the machine and waited while it warmed.
Ambitious Robert was going into the future. Not far, just one hour … but it would make history; he would be the first. No one else seemed to have the slightest inkling of the method, but narrow-eyed Robert had run across it and had built his machine, telling the administration it was something else, keeping it secret, keeping men from the bigger universities and corporations from coming in and taking over his work. "I have to believe in my own abilities," Robert had said.
Arthur watched him as he lay back on the couch under the apparatus of the machine. Robert's eyes, long-lashed, closed softly, and he drew a deep, even breath. "I'm ready."
So brown Robert goes into the future, Arthur thought. And when he comes back he intends to bring witnesses to see him an hour from now, two of him, and to explain it all with his full, rich, curdled voice, and write a paper and go to a larger university and be famous where there are more and more young, rounded girls. Because Robert knows reality almost as well as I do.
Arthur checked the dials and meters of the machine carefully, seeing that they were exactly as Robert had ordered them. Arthur was a good, careful worker, and that was why, even when Mr. Lewis' assistant had scoffed at him, he had not been afraid of being dismissed. Everybody knew that he always did exactly as he was told.
"Good-bye," he said. He flicked the switch and Robert disappeared.
He stepped over to the empty couch and placed his hand on the soft, worn leather cushion, feeling its warmth from the body which had just left it. Robert was in the future.
But he had to bring him back. He reset the machine and threw another switch and Robert reappeared on the couch. Arthur went and stood over him and looked for a long time at the blood flowing from his mouth and nostrils and eyes and ears. There was a small hole torn through his right leg, and that was beginning to bleed too. He was dead.
The gash in his leg must have been from a small meteor, Arthur decided. He had heard about them when he'd been working in the observatory. And one afternoon when he had been working there he had realized what would happen to Robert when he went into the future. Of course he could travel forward in time and reappear an hour later, but the Earth would not be there, because the Earth moved around the sun at about eighteen and half miles a second and for that matter the whole solar system seemed to be moving at about twelve miles a second toward a point in the constellation Hercules. That was what someone in the Astronomy department had told him, anyway, and he had memorized it.
So Robert had landed an hour in the future, but somewhere out in space, and he had died, the pressure of oxygen in his body hemorrhaging his blood vessels and bursting his lungs before he could even suffocate. But of course it hadn't been Arthur's fault.
Humming softly to himself, Arthur closed down the machine and washed as much blood as he could from Robert's head. Some of it was drying already, leaving a brownish crust on the cold skin. He rearranged Robert's clothes and went downstairs to report what had happened.
He went directly, stopping only once to watch a young girl with a soft, full red sweater as she struggled out of her heavy coat.
The End
/> © 1962. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1962.
Black Country
Charles Beaumont
Spoof Collins blew his brains out, all right—right on out through the top of his head. But I don't mean with a gun. I mean with a horn. Every night: slow and easy, eight to one. And that's how he died. Climbing, with that horn, climbing up high. For what? "Hey, man, Spoof-listen, you picked the tree, now come on down!" But he couldn't come down; he didn't know how. He just kept climbing, higher and higher. And then he fell. Or jumped. Anyhow, that's the way he died.
The bullet didn't kill anything. I'm talking about the one that tore up the top of his mouth. It didn't kill anything that wasn't dead already. Spoof just put in an extra note, that's all.
We planted him out about four miles from town—home is where you drop: residential district, all wood construction. Rain? You know it. Bible type: sky like a month-old bedsheet, wind like a stepped-on cat, cold and dark, those Forty Days, those Forty Nights! But nice and quiet most of the time. Like Spoof: nice and quiet, with a lot underneath that you didn't like to think about.
We planted him and watched and put what was his down into the ground with him. His horn, battered, dented, nicked—right there in his hands, but not just there; I mean in position, so if he wanted to do some more climbing, all right, he could. And his music. We planted that too, because leaving it out would have been like leaving out Spoof's arms or his heart or his guts.
Lux started things off with a chord from his guitar, no particular notes, only a feeling, a sound. A Spoof Collins kind of sound. Jimmy Fritch picked it up with his stick, and they talked a while—Lux got a real piano out of that git-box. Then when Jimmy stopped talking and stood there, waiting, Sonny Holmes stepped up and wiped his mouth and took the melody on his shiny new trumpet. It wasn't Spoof, but it came close; and it was still The Jimjam Man, the way Spoof wrote it back when he used to write things down. Sonny got off with a high-squealing blast, and no eyes came up—we knew, we remembered. The kid always had it collared. He just never talked about it. And listen to him now! He stood there over Spoof's grave, giving it all back to The Ol' Massuh, giving it back right—"Broom off, white child, you got four sides!" "I want to learn from you, Mr. Collins. I want to play jazz, and you can teach me." "I got things to do, I can't waste no time on a half-hipped young'un." "Please, Mr. Collins." "You got to stop that, you got to stop callin' me 'Mr. Collins,' hear?" "Yes, sir, yes sir."—He put out real sound, like he didn't remember a thing. Like he wasn't playing for that pile of darkmeat in the ground, not at all; but for the great Spoof Collins, for the man Who Knew and the man Who Did, who gave jazz spats and dressed up the blues, who did things with a trumpet that a trumpet couldn't do, and more: for the man who could blow down the walls or make a chicken cry, without half trying—for the mighty Spoof, who'd once walked in music like a boy in river mud, loving it, breathing it, living it.
Then Sonny quit. He wiped his mouth again and stepped back and Mr. "T" took it on his trombone while I beat up the tubs.
Pretty soon we had The Jimjam Man rocking the way it used to rock. A little slow, maybe: it needed Bud Meunier on bass and a few trips on the piano. But it moved.
We went through Take It From Me and Night in the Blues and Big Gig and Only Us Chickens and Forty G's—Sonny's insides came out through the horn on that one, I could tell—and Slice City Stomp—you remember: sharp and clean, like sliding down a razor—and What the Cats Dragged In—the longs, the shorts, all the great Spoof Collins numbers. We wrapped them up and put them down there with him.
Then it got dark.
And it was time for the last one, the greatest one … Rose-Ann shivered and cleared her throat; the rest of us looked around, for the first time, at all those rows of split-wood grave markers, shining in the rain, and the trees and the coffin, dark, wet. Out by the fence, a couple of farmers stood watching. Just watching.
One—Rose-Ann opens her coat, puts her hands on her hips, wets her lips;
Two—Freddie gets the spit out of his stick, rolls his eyes;
Three…—Sonny puts the trumpet to his mouth;
Four—
And we played Spoof's song, his last one, the one he wrote a long way ago, before the music dried out his head, before he turned mean and started climbing: Black Country. The song that said just a little of what Spoof wanted to say, and couldn't.
You remember. Spider-slow chords crawling down, soft, easy, and then bottom and silence and, suddenly, the cry of the horn, screaming in one note all the hate and sadness and loneliness, all the want and got-to-have; and then the note dying, quick, and Rose-Ann's voice, a whisper, a groan, a sigh …
"Black Country is somewhere, Lord,
That I don't want to go.
Black Country is somewhere
That I never want to go.
Rain-water drippin'
On the bed and on the floor,
Rain-water drippin'
From the ground and through the door …"
We all heard the piano, even though it wasn't there. Fingers moving down those minor chords, those black keys, that black country …
"Well, in that old Black Country
If you ain't feelin' good,
They let you have an overcoat
That's carved right out of wood.
But way down there
It gets so dark
You never see a friend—
Black Country may not be the Most,
But, Lord! it's sure the End …"
Bitter little laughing words, piling up, now mad, now sad; and then, an ugly blast from the horn and Rose-Ann's voice screaming, crying:
"I never want to go there, Lord!
I never want to be,
I never want to lay down
In that Black Country!"
And quiet, quiet, just the rain, and the wind.
"Let's go man," Freddie said.
So we turned around and left Spoof there under the ground.
Or, at least, that's what I thought we did.
Sonny took over without saying a word. He didn't have to: just who was about to fuss? He was white, but he didn't play white, not these days; and he learned the hard way—by unlearning. Now he could play gutbucket and he could play blues, stomp and slide, name it, Sonny could play it. Funny as hell to hear, too, because he looked like everything else but a musician. Short and skinny, glasses, nose like a melted candle, head clean as the one-ball, and white? Next to old Hushup, that café sunburn glowed like a flashlight.
"Man, who skinned you?"
"Who dropped you in the flour barrel?"
But he got closer to Spoof than any of the rest of us did. He knew what to do, and why. Just like a school teacher all the time: "That's good, Lux, that's awful good—now let's play some music." "Get off it, C.T.—what's Lenox Avenue doing in the middle of Lexington?" "Come on, boys, hang on to the sound, hang on to it!" Always using words like "flavor" and "authentic" and "blood," peering over those glasses, pounding his feet right through the floor: STOMP! STOMP! "That's it, we've got it now—oh, listen! It's true, it's clean!" STOMP! STOMP!
Not the easiest to dig him. Nobody broke all the way through.
"How come, boy? What for?" and every time the same answer:
"I want to play jazz."
Like he'd joined the Church and didn't want to argue about it.
Spoof was still Spoof when Sonny started coming around. Not a lot of people with us then, but a few, enough—the longhairs and critics and connoisseurs—and some real ears, too—enough to fill a club every night, and who needs more? It was COLLINS AND HIS CREW, tight and neat, never a performance, always a session. Lot of music, lot of fun. And a line-up that some won't forget: Jimmy Fritch on clarinet, Honker Reese on alto-sax, Charles di Lusso on tenor, Spoof on trumpet, Henry Walker on piano, Lux Anderson on banjo, and myself—Hushup Paige—on drums. Newmown hay, all right, I know—I remember, I've heard the records we cut—but, the
Road was there.
Sonny used to hang around the old Continental Club on State Street in Chicago, every night, listening. Eight o'clock roll 'round, and there he'd be—a little different: younger, skinnier—listening hard, over in a corner all to himself, eyes closed like he was asleep. Once in a while he put in a request—Darktown Strutter's Ball was one he liked, and some of Jelly Roll's numbers—but mostly he just sat there, taking it all in. For real.
And it kept up like this for two or three weeks, regular as 2/4.
Now Spoof was mean in those days—don't think he wasn't—but not blood-mean. Even so, the white boy in the corner bugged Ol' Massuh after a while and he got to making dirty cracks with his horn: WAAAAA! Git your ass out of here. WAAAAA! You only think you're with it! WAAAAA! There's a little white child sittin' in a chair, there's a little white child losin' all his hair …
It got to the kid, too, every bit of it. And that made Spoof even madder. But what can you do?
Came Honker's trip to Slice City along about then: our saxman got a neck all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker's grease in the worst way. But we'd been together for five years or more, and a new man just didn't play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn't grow the piece back so we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from that wound.
Then one night it bust. We'd gone through some slow-walking stuff, some tricky stuff and some loud stuff—still covering up—when this kid, this white boy, got up from his chair and ankled over and tapped Spoof on the shoulder. It was break-time and Spoof was brought down about Honker, about how bad we were sounding, sitting there sweating, those pounds of man, black as coaldust soaked in oil—he was the blackest man!—and those eyes, beady white and small as agates.
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 Page 32
