by Damon Knight
But why would you want to?
The airport waiting room was a little like a scene out of "Things to Come, except that the people were neither white-robed, leisurely nor cool.
Every place on every bench was taken. Duke found a couple of square feet of floor space behind a pillar and settled Johnny there, seated on his upended suitcase.
"Now you're all set. Got your ticket. Got your magazine. Okay." Duke made an abrupt menacing gesture in order to look at his wrist-watch.
"Got to run. Now remember, boy -- send me your address as soon as you get one, so I can forward your mail and so on. Oh: almost forgot." He scribbled on a piece of paper, handed it over. "Mere formality. Payable at any time. Sign here."
He had written, "I O U $50." Johnny signed, feeling a little more at home with Duke.
"Right. Oll korrect."
"Duke," said Johnny suddenly. "Mary's pregnant, isn't she?" His expression was thoughtful.
"It has been known to happen," said Duke good-humoredly.
"Why don't you give her a break?" Johnny asked with difficulty.
Duke was not offended. "How? Speak the truth to me, Johnny -- do you see me as a happy bridegroom? Well --" He pumped Johnny's hand. "The word must be spoken that bids you depart -- Though the effort to speak it should shatter my heart -- Though in silence, with something I pine -- Yet the lips that touch liquor must never touch mine!" With a grin that seemed to linger, like the Cheshire Cat's, he disappeared into the crowd.
II
Uncomfortably astride his suitcase, solitary among multitudes, Johnny found himself thinking in words harder and longer at a time than he was used to. The kind of thinking he did when he was painting, or had painted, or was about to paint was another process altogether, and there were days on end when he did nothing else. He had a talent, Johnny Bornish. A talent is sometimes defined as a gift of the gods, a thing that most people, who have not had one, confuse with a present under a Christmas tree.
It was not like that at all. It tortured and delighted him, and took up so much room in his skull that a lot of practical details couldn't get in. Without exaggeration, it obsessed him, and when occasionally, as now, its grip relaxed, Johnny had the comical expression of a man who has just waked up to find his pocket picked and a row of hotfoot scars around his shoes.
He was thinking about luck. It was all right to talk about everybody making his own, and to a certain extent he supposed it was true, but Duke was the kind of guy who found money on the street. Such a thing had happened to Johnny only once in his life, and then it wasn't legal tender, but a Japanese coin -- copper, heavy, about the size of a half-dollar, with a chrysanthemum symbol on one side and a character on the other. He thought of it as his lucky piece; he had found it on the street, his last year in high school, and here -- he took it out of his pocket -- it still was.
. . . Which, when you came to think of it, was odd. He was not superstitious about the coin, or especially fond of it. He called it a lucky piece for want of a better name, because the word "keepsake" had gone out of fashion; and in fact he believed that his luck in the last ten years had been lousy. The coin was the only thing he owned that was anywhere near that old. He had lost three wristwatches, numberless fountain pens, two hats, three or four cigarette lighters, and genuine U. S. nickels and dimes by the handful. But here was the Japanese coin.
Now, how could you figure a thing like that, unless it was luck . . . or interference?
Johnny sat up straighter. It was a foolish notion, probably born of the fact that he hadn't had any lunch; but he was in a mood to read sinister significance into almost anything.
He already knew that the old man and the tweedy woman had been interfering in his life for at least five years, probably longer. Somehow, they were responsible for the "accidents" that kept happening to him -- and there was a foolish and sinister notion for you, if you liked. Believing that, how could he help wondering about other odd things that had happened to him, no matter how small . . . like finding and keeping a Japanese coin?
With that kind of logic, you could prove anything. And yet, he couldn't rid himself of the idea.
Idly, he got up, holding the coin, and dropped it into a nearby waste can. He sat down on his suitcase again with a feeling of neurosis well quelled. If the coin somehow found its way back to him, he'd have evidence for thinking the worst of it; if it didn't, as of course it wouldn't, small loss.
"Excuse me," said a thinnish prim-faced little man in almost-clerical clothes. "I believe you dropped this. A Japanese coin. Quite nice."
Johnny found his tongue. "Uh, thank you. But I don't want it -- you keep it."
"Oh, no," said the little man, and walked stiffly away.
Johnny stared after him, then at the coin. It was lumpishly solid, a dirty-looking brown, nicked and rounded at the edges. Ridiculous!
His mistake, no doubt, had been in being too obvious. He palmed the coin, trying to look nonchalant. After a while he lit a cigarette, dropped it, and as he fumbled for it, managed to shove the coin under the leg of the adjoining bench.
He had taken one puff on the retrieved cigarette when a large hulk in a gray suit, all muscles and narrowed eyes, knelt beside him and extracted the coin. The hulk looked at it carefully, front and back, weighed it in his palm, rang it on the floor, and finally handed it over to Johnny. "This yours?" he asked in a gravelly voice.
Johnny nodded. The hulk said nothing more, but watched grimly until Johnny put the coin away in his pocket. Then he got up, dusted off his knees, and went away into the crowd.
Johnny felt a cold lump gather at the pit of his stomach. The fact that he had seen this same routine in at least half a dozen bad movies gave him no comfort; he did not believe in the series of natural coincidences that made it impossible to get rid of the neatly wrapped garbage, or the incriminating nylon stocking, or whatever.
He stood up. It was already twenty minutes after his plane's scheduled departure time. He had to get rid of the thing. It was intolerable to suppose that he couldn't get rid of it. Of course he could get rid of it.
The low false roof of the baggage counter looked promising. He picked up his suitcase and worked his way toward it, and got there iust as the p. a. system burst forth with "Flight number mnglang for Buzzclickville, now loading at Gate Lumber Lide." Under cover of this clamor, Johnny swiftly took the coin out of his pocket and tossed it out of sight on the roof.
Now what? Was somebody going to fetch a ladder, and climb up there after the coin, and come down and hand it to him?
Nothing at all happened, except that the voice on the p. a. emitted its thunderous mutter again, and this time Johnny caught the name of his destination, Jacksonville.
Feeling better, he stopped at the newsstand for cigarettes. He paid for them with a half dollar, which was promptly slapped back into his palm.
"Flight mumble sixteen for Jagznbull, now loading at Gate Number Nine," said the p. a.
After a moment Johnny handed back the cigarettes, still staring at the Japanese coin that lay, infuriatingly solid, on his palm . . . He had had a fifty-cent piece in his pocket; it didn't seem to he there now; ergo, he had thrown it up on top of the baggage counter. A natura! mistake. Only, in ten years of carrying the coin around with him, he had never once mistaken it for a half-buck, or vice versa, until now.
"Flight number sixteen . . ."
The tweedy woman, Johnny realized with a slow chill crawling down his back, had been ahead of him in the art store, talking to a clerk. She couldn't have been following him -- on the bus, in a cab, or any other way; there wouldn't have been time. She had known where he was going, and when he was going to get there.
It was as if, he thought, while the coin seemed to turn fishily cold and smooth in his fingers, it was just as if the two of them, the tweedy woman and the old man, had planted a sort of beacon on him ten years ago, so that wherever and whenever he went, he was a belled cat. It was as if they might be looking in a kind of radarscope, whe
n it pleased them, and seeing the track of his life like a twisted strand of copper wire coiling and turning . . .
But of course there was no escape, if that was true. His track went winding through the waiting room and onto a particular aircraft and down again, where that plane landed, and into a particular room and then a particular restaurant, so that a day from now, a month, a year, ten years from now, they could reach out and touch him wherever he might be.
There was no escape, because there was a peculiarity built into this brown Japanese coin, a combination of random events that added up to the mirth-provoking result that he simply couldn't lose it.
He looked around wildly, thinking Blowtorch. Monkey wrench. Sledge-hammer. But there wasn't anything. It was a great big phony Things-to-Comeish airport wildcat waiting room, without a tool in it anywhere.
A pretty girl came out from behind the counter to his right, swinging up the hinged section of counter and letting it down again behind her. Johnny stared after her stupidly, then at the way she had come out. His scalp twitched. He stepped to the counter, raised the hinged section.
A bald man a few feet away stopped talking to wave a telephone handset at Johnny. "No admittance here, sir! No admittance!"
Johnny put the Japanese coin down at an angle on the place that supported the end of the hinged section. He made sure it was the Japanese coin. He wedged it firmly.
The bald man dropped his telephone and came toward him, hand outstretched.
Johnny slammed the hinged section down as hard as he could. There was a dull bonk, and an odd feeling of tension; the lights seemed to blur. He turned and ran. Nobody followed him.
The plane was a two-englned relic that looked faintly Victorian from the outside; inside, it was a slanting dark cavern with an astonishing number of seats crammed into it. It smelled like a locker room. Johnny stumbled down the narrow aisle to what seemed to be the only remaining place, next to a large dark gentleman in an awning-striped tie.
He sat down, a little awkwardly. He had had a peculiar feeling ever since he had bashed the coin with the counter section, and the worst of it was that he couldn't pin it down. It was a physical something-wrong feeling, like an upset stomach or too little sleep or a fever coming on, but it wasn't exactly any of those things. He was hungry, but not that hungry. He thought the trouble might be with his eyes, but whenever he picked out anything as a test, it looked perfectly normal and he could see it fine. It was in his skin, perhaps? a kind of not-quite-prickling that . . . No, it wasn't his skin.
It was a little like being drunk, at the fraction of an instant when you realize how drunk you are and regret it . . . it was like that, but not very much. And it was partly like the foreboding, stronger and more oppressive. than before -- Something bad was going to happen.
The pilot and copilot walked up the aisle and disappeared into the forward compartment. The door was shut; the stewardess, back in the tail, was poring over the papers on her clipboard. After a while the starters whined and the engines came to life; Johnny, who had flown only once before, and on a scheduled airline at that, was startled to find what a devil of a racket they made. Then was another interminable wait, and then the plane was crawling forward, swinging its nose around, crawling a little faster, while an endless blank expanse of concrete slipped by -- lumbering along, then, like some huge, preposterous, and above all flightless bird -- and lifting incredibly, a few inches up, airborne, the runway falling back, tilted, dwindling until they were up, high above the mist on the water, steady as a hammock in the rasping monotone drone of the engines.
Something went flip at the corner of Johnny's vision. He turned his head.
Flop.
It was a little metallic disk that went flip up the carpet like a tiddlywink or a Mexican jumping bean, and paused for an instant while his jaw began to come loose at the hinge, and went flop. It lay on the carpet next to his seat, and went hop.
It landed on his knee, a little brown metallic disk with a chrysanthemum design, bent across the middle. He brushed at it. It hopped, and clung to his hand like a magnet to steel.
"Good heavensl' said an explosive voice in his ear.
Johnny had no attention to spare. He had taken hold of the coin with his other hand -- a horrid feeling, it clung clammily to his fingers, and pulled away from his palm with reluctance -- and now he was trying to scrape it off against the fabric of the seat. It was like trying to scrape off his own skin. He gave up and furiously began shaking his hand.
"Here, friend, don't do that!" The dark man in the next seat half rose, and there was a moment of confusion; Johnny heard a sharp click, and thought he saw something leap from the dark man's vest pocket. Then, for an instant, he had clinging to his fingers a brown Japanese coin and a pair of glittering pince-nez. And then the two had somehow twisted together in a nasty, writhing way that hurt his eyes to watch, and uncurled again -- no coin, no pince-nez, but an impossible little leather change purse.
Had the coin ever been a coin at all? Was the change purse a change purse?
"Now look what you've done! Ugh!" The dark man, his face contorted with passion, reached gingerly fingers toward the purse. "Don't move, friend. Let me --"
Johnny pulled away a trifle. "Who are you?"
"F.B.I.," said the dark man impatiently. He flapped a billfold at Johnny; there was some kind of official-looking shield inside. "Now you have torn it, my God! Hold that still -- just like that. Don't move." He pulled back his sleeves like a conjuror, and began to reach very cautiously for the little brown bit of leather that clung to Johnny's hand.
The thing twitched slightly in his fingers. The next moment, people all around them began getting up and crowding into the aisle, heading for the single washroom back in the tail of the plane.
Palpably, the plane tilted. Johnny heard the stewardess shrieking, "One at a time! One at a time! Take your seats, everyone -- you're making the airplane tail-heavy!"
"Steady, steady," moaned the dark man. "Hold it absolutely still!"
Johnny couldn't. His fingers twitched again; and abruptly all the passengers in the aisle were tumbling the other way, fighting to get away from the dangerous tail. The stewardess came helplessly after them, squalling futile orders.
"Am I doing that?" Johnny gasped, staring in horror at the thing in his palm.
"The gadget is. Hold it steady, friend --"
But his hand twitched again, and abruptly all the passengers were back in their seats, quietly sitting as if nothing had happened. Then a chorus of shrieks arose. Looking out the window, Johnny saw a terrifying sea of treetops just below, where nothing but empty air had been the moment before. As the plane nosed up sharply, his hand moved again --
And the shrieks grew louder. Up ahead loomed a blue-violet wall of mountain, topless, gigantic.
His fingers twitched still again: and once more the plane was droning peaceably along between earth and heaven. The passengers were bored or sleeping. There was no mountain, and no trees.
Sweat was beaded on the dark man's forehead. "Now . . ." he said, gritting his teeth and reaching again.
"Wait a minute," said Johnny, pulling away again. "Wait -- This is some kind of top secret thing, is it, that I'm not supposed to have?"
"Yes," said the dark man, agonized. "I tell you, friend, don't move it!"
The purse was slowly changing color, turning a watery violet around the edges.
"And you're from the F.B.I?" Johnny asked, staring hard at the dark man.
"Yes! Hold it steady --"
"No," said Johnny. His voice had a disposition to tremble, but Johnny held it firmly in check. '"You forgot about your ears," he said. "Or are they too hard to change?"
The dark man showed his teeth. "What are you talking about?"
"The ears," JOhnny said, "and the jawbone. No two people have ears alike. And before, when you were the old man, your neck was too thick. It bothered me, only I was too busy to think about it." He swallowed hard. "I'm thinking about it now. You
don't want me to move this thing?"
"Right, friend, right."
"Then tell me what this is all about."
The dark man made placating gestures. "I can't do that, friend. I really can't. Look --"
The tiny weight shifted in Johnny's hand. " --out!" shouted the dark man.
Tiny flickerings gathered in the air around them. In the plane window, the clear blue of the sky abruptly vanished. Instead, Johnny saw a tumbling waste of gray cloud. Rain drummed against the window and the plane heeled suddenly as if a gust had caught it.
