At that point the bedside telephone rang.
“Hello,” said Frank.
“Is this Frank?” asked the voice at the other end of the line. “That ugly guy, right?”
Frank felt like hurling down the phone. “How dare you insult me?” he cried angrily. “What business is it of yours?”
“Now, now,” said the voice. “Don’t ruffle your feathers. I just wanted to establish your identity. ...Listen, Frank, I’ve got good news for you.”
But Frank was sceptical. “I don’t want to buy any more medical insurance or subscribe to a financial newsletter.”
“How’d you like to be goodlooking?”
This was even worse. “I don’t like to be rude,” said Frank, “but you’ve just about lost me.”
“No strings,” said the voice. “Just go look in the bathroom mirror.” The line went dead.
Well, it didn’t cost anything to look, though Frank was sure he was making a fool of himself and had been victimized by a cruel practical joker.
...He was staggered to see a very handsome face staring back at him from the mirror on the medicine chest! It was himself, all right, and not a picture of a movie star that had been pasted on the glass. He had the same individual features as before: eyes, nose, chin, forehead, but the ensemble was somehow altogether different.
Aw, it was probably some kind of autohypnosis. He probably wanted so much to be goodlooking that he had convinced himself. But he could not have gone to sleep if he had let it go at that.
He got dressed and went down to the lobby of his building, which unfortunately for his current purpose was too small to employ a doorman, and though he lingered in the lobby for a while none of the other tenants came or went. He finally became too impatient to wait, and he went out and wandered along the darkened sidewalks of the city. Before very long a man stepped out from behind a tree, stuck a pistol into Frank’s belly, and demanded his money.
“Oh, God,” Frank gasped. “I left my wallet back home! I guess you’ll kill me now.” It occurred to him that this would settle the problem of his appearance once and for all.
But the robber said, “No. We’re going home together, the both of us, and get your funds.”
So they started to walk, the man with the gun right behind Frank. When they came to a place where there was a ring of light from a streetlamp, Frank glanced back at the perpetrator, so that he might identify him for the police later on. But he soon regretted having done this, for the thug instantly ordered him to stop. Oh-oh, thought Frank, here’s where I get shot for my pains.
But the robber said, “Just a minute! Let me look at you.” He took Frank by the elbow and led him to a place where the light from the streetlamp was at its brightest. He stared at Frank and then he put his pistol away.
“You’re really a handsome guy!” the robber said. “I can’t take the money of anybody who looks as good as you do. I apologize for putting you to any trouble.” He shrugged as if in shame, turned, and walked rapidly away.
Frank was so amazed that he continued to stand there. After a while a police car rolled up and stopped at the curb near him, and the beam of a powerful flashlight was directed into his eyes.
“Say, fella, c’mere,” called the cop from his window, and Frank approached the car.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” the policeman said, and he lowered his light. “There are reports that a mugger is in the area, but I don’t suppose he would bother anyone as fine looking as you.”
“He just went down that way,” said Frank.
The cop begged his forgiveness again and drove on. Frank had now heard the testimony of two independent witnesses, neither of whom he had ever seen before. Of course, it was just barely possible that the wellwisher who had telephoned him had hired actors to impersonate the would-be robber and the cop and perform as they did so as to encourage him to believe he had become handsome, but that seemed extremely unlikely. Who would have a motive to befriend him in such a way? Certainly not anyone in his family. At the previous holiday season his mother and sister had entreated him to stay away from them on compassionate grounds, now that his father was no longer alive. Perhaps one of his fellow scientists: for example, the man he thought of as his best friend?
Frank went home and called this individual.
“Hi, Harvey. Frank. Say, would you be involved in some scheme to make me think I am handsome?”
Harvey laughed heartily. “What a question! Certainly not, Frank. Look, as scientists we must accept the truth, even though it be uncomfortable. You’re ugly: that’s all there is to it. As long as you keep your mask on when you’re near me, though, I couldn’t care less. If you ever do take it off again in my presence I’ll throw acid at you. Bye.”
Frank had never suspected that Harvey was capable of such extreme emotion: he had always seemed such a cold fish. But Frank was beginning to realize that human beings tend to have very strong feelings about how other people look, whether ugly or beautiful. He decided to put aside an investigation into who was responsible until it could be determined that something definitely had happened to him, for if the change was as remarkable as was suggested, then it was only basic scientific procedure to seek as much evidence as possible to bear upon the subject, pro or con.
Next morning, whenever Frank was stopped at a red light on the route to the nuclear plant, persons in nearby cars smiled at him and if they were female they shouted from their windows proposals that were sometimes all but indecent. This sort of thing was altogether unprecedented in Frank’s experience, and he was uncertain as to what response he should make.
But by the time he reached the plant so many overtures had been made to him that he had become a bit bolder and he was looking forward to encountering Linda, the female scientist who had only the day before fainted away on seeing how ugly he was. However, she was a bit late in arriving at work this morning, so he went ahead and suited up in his protective costume, including the mask, and when the lady did appear he forgot that his newly handsome face was concealed.
“Good morning, Frank,” said she. “Please, for the love of God, don’t take off your mask again today. I think a second look at you would be the end of me altogether.”
“Aha,” he answered through the aperture, “a surprise is in store for you, my dear lady!” And he tore away the headpiece of his suit.
Linda now almost fainted from delight, and when she got herself together again she said, “You’re the handsomest man I have ever seen, Frank!” And she asked him how the change had come about.
He told her about the telephone call.
“But how could that have changed anything?” she asked incredulously. “Unless you are saying that the person on the phone was God?”
“Golly, Linda, I don’t know what to say,” answered Frank. “I have always thought of myself as an atheistic scientist.”
She frowned and made a funny sort of mouth. “The thing that bothers me,” she said, “is why would God use the telephone? Why would He have to?”
But the person Frank married was Madeleine Swan, the multi-millionaire businesswoman, who picked him up in a health-food store. He gave up his career and stayed home all day, watching television and taking baths. Sometimes he missed his former life and its mental demands, but not often. He enjoyed being just another pretty face.
Planet Of The Losers
WE HAD SOMETIME SINCE reached the stage at which anything could provoke a quarrel. In this case it was whether the cheese had ripened beyond the point of no return, and Myra finally threw her glass not at me but across the kitchen, apparently without special target—it struck the refrigerator—and hardly had the spray of wine and powdered glass reached the vinyl floor than she was out of the house and in the car, and by the time I reached the porch, her back wheels were churning up a wake of dust and gravel.
It was her car, my weekend country cottage. It was Sunday evening. If she did not return by morning I would have to find another way back to the city from this pas
toral area that was serviced by no train or nearby bus route.
I slunk back inside and refilled my own glass with the Rhone red I had extracted from a wooden half-tub full of assorted bottles at my favorite discount liquor store, an establishment that provided more than a few pretexts for our spats, for Myra fancied herself an oenophile but was in reality that familiar sort of wine snob who despises any label which he-she has never seen before you present the bottle for inspection. There was a time when, in an effort to best her, I would do some research and find, say, a chateau unheard of by her but renowned to the wine critics of connoisseur publications. As expected, Myra would sneer at the name and grimace at her first taste, but it did me no good to produce the appropriate clippings. “Then this is simply one bottle that’s gone off,” she would say between almost closed teeth. “If you have any self-respect, you’ll take it back. They’d think better of you for doing that. They look down on people who put up with such abuse and will only give you one bad bottle after another.”
But before drinking my wine now, I cleaned up that which had run down the refrigerator’s face to mix with the broken glass on the floor. That was a job that could not be long delayed, for my Golden Retriever, who was occupied outdoors at the moment, might return at any time, and he had the appetite of a goat without the impervious stomach that should be prerequisite. Which is to say, this dog would have been quite capable of lapping up both wine and glass. His name was Bub.
I had just emptied the dustpan into the pedal can that dwells beneath the sink when I heard the sound of an engine. Myra was returning much sooner than she usually did after a tantrum, and from the awful noise being produced by the car, I could tell why. It was obvious that her old Escort had finally revolted against a criminal lack of care.
I hastened outside, I confess, to jeer. But when I crossed the threshold and stepped upon the porch which Myra insisted was practically unusable without screening, I left my familiar world for that of hallucination.
A flying saucer was landing in the adjacent meadow. It looked exactly as they always do in vintage sci-fi movies and the eyeball-witness accounts printed in the trashy papers sold at supermarket checkouts. Which is to say, it was a great big disc with portholes around the rim. Have I said that the time of day was twilight? Some form of illumination, presumably electric, could be seen behind the portholes. The engines now ceased to produce noise, and as the gigantic Frisbee settled slowly to the ground I heard nothing but the faint sound of the stubble being crushed. My farmer neighbor periodically gave this field a rest after cropping to ankle-level what had lately grown there: it was in such condition now. Beyond the meadow was a mile or two of vacant woods.
My pet chose this moment to come home to the human being whom the canine god had assigned as his protector against bizarre menaces. Bub is valiant when it comes to other dogs and will stand up to a mastiff, but the unexpected features that are routine occurrences in the life of man, the sudden ringing of the telephone or doorbell, the stovetop grease fire, or any bent figure carrying a sack sends him to cower behind his master’s knees. At the moment, however, I was pleased to have him there, his firm warm hairy body bolstering the legs that might well otherwise have buckled. After decades of movies about space creatures, pro and con, I was far from being ready to confront a newly arrived delegation. But the car was gone, and I had no place reasonably to run to, my nearest neighbor being the aforementioned farmer, who I happened to know had, with his taciturn wife and insolent teenaged son, left on a rare trip to visit inlaws in the suburbs of the city.
Therefore I stood there, propped up by and shielding Bub, and waited passively as an oblong of yellow light appeared between two of the portholes and an extensible gangplank emerged from it to touch the ground. It was ever so long before this was put into use—long enough, indeed, for me to wonder in terror whether the ship’s company was invisible and, if so, had landed and was all about me.
But finally a figure appeared in the opening of the hatch and after what appeared to be a cautious survey of the nearby terrain, began to descend the inclined deboarding ramp.
At least the creature had a head, a trunk, and four limbs of what would seem the human type, and its form of locomotion was that of a person, as were such of its gestures as I could see from fifty or sixty yards away. Somewhere along the ramp it paused for a moment with hands on hips. Then it shook its head and glanced back at the ship, after which it rubbed its chin, for all the world as my old Uncle Marty would undoubtedly have done had he found himself deboarding first from a vehicle that had just landed on an unfamiliar planet. I have not picked my example at random. As the spaceman reached the ground and began to approach the porch, I saw even more resemblances to my maternal uncle: an upper body that in form suggested an avocado, a head fuzzy at both temples but radiantly bald in between, a splayed sort of stride, with the feet at right angles to each other, and finally, the kind of two-piece suit that were it made of wool would have been baggy, but in polyester doubleknit looked, here and there, uncomfortably snug. He was not, so far as I could see, armed, but the possibility that he had available some more subtle kind of weapon, perhaps one that could be triggered by his thoughts, restrained me from assuming that because of the attire and penguin-footed stride, shared with Uncle Marty, he was as harmless.
But Bub suddenly lost all fear and bounded out from the shelter of my back-of-leg, approaching the space creature with bare-fanged hostility and a deep-throated unpleasant sound that I had never before heard him emit.
The figure from the saucer abruptly halted, then bent at the waist and began to speak to the dog in a very human-sounding way.
“Hiyee, wuzzums! Is oo upset cuz fella on oor turf? Oo, but ize oor friend, oh what a sweet poochie-woochie boy oo is.”
Bub hesitated for a moment, limbs and tail gone rigid, and then his growl became even more menacing and his advance even more ill-willed. It occurred to me that if the creature was not armed in any fashion, his comrades on the ship must certainly have weapons at their disposal, and with but one set of teeth, poor Bub could easily be outgunned. I silently cursed my pet, for without his display we both might have slunk out the back of the house and concealed ourselves in the woods till the saucer had finished its business, whatever that might be, and had taken off. As it was, I now had to put myself in jeopardy. But you just can’t abandon a pet like Bub, especially when your closest female friend is someone as volatile as Myra.
I called out to my dog, praying that my voice did not sound as feeble to the space person as it did to me. “Bub! You come back here! These nice folks don’t mean any harm.” The last was obviously putting the wish before the fact.
Bub proceeded to growl more furiously, which I might have anticipated, familiar as I was with his tendency to grandstand when he believed I would be impressed.
But the man from the saucer straightened up from the crouch in which he had been trying to placate the animal and said, in a voice quite as fearful as mine, “Hello, sir! Please forgive us for the intrusion, but I’m afraid we had to make an emergency landing, and we thought an empty field was far better for it than to crash into a hospital or any place thickly inhabited. Of course we’ll make any compensation within our power if we have damaged your land. You have a lovely dog. I’d like to pet him, but I’m afraid he doesn’t seem to like me.”
Encouraged by the pacific speech, Bub was now ready to jump him. I went down the three steps into the yard and in a burst of inspiration uttered the only words that could have had any effect on my dog. “Bub, want some steak?”
The animal quickly exchanged the display of hostility for his wheedling act, a sequence in which grovel, if not answered immediately, gives way to snivel, and which normally is ingratiating enough. But the spaceman had precedence at this moment.
I fended Bub off with the side of my sneaker, smiled, and said, “Hello. My name is Tony Walsh. I come here on weekends. That’s not really my field, but I’m sure you’re welcome to it.”
He came forward and put out a hand that looked, and felt, altogether human. “Hi, there. My name is Wonk.”
I had begun by now, without being at all conscious about it, to assume that he and his ship were actually American and only superficially exotic. But the simple sound of his name was enough to return me if not to fear, then at least to wonderment.
“Are you from, uh, someplace else?”
He was still shaking my hand in a rather flabby clutch. “We’re from Wurtz.” It was still sufficiently light to see that though he did not resemble Uncle Marty in any facial feature, he looked quite as human. He had a pug nose, crinkly eyes, a slightly recessive chin, and what would seem a set of regular, if dingy, teeth. He waited as if for my reaction and when none came, said, “In the galaxy of Wile? You don’t know it? It’s just beyond—”
“Forgive me,” I said, “I know almost nothing of astronomy, and in fact I’ve never even read much science fiction. I have never taken flying saucers seriously. I’m not sure I’m not dreaming at this moment, to be frank.”
He frowned. “Oh, I don’t believe you are. In any case, I’m real enough.” He had finally dropped my hand, but he now reclasped it. “You can feel my flesh, I’m here. And so is the ship. You might come and visit it, though I’m afraid we can’t afford you the hospitality we’d like, for we’re out of provisions—which in fact is one of the reasons why we’ve had to land.”
I flapped my arms. “Well, you’re certainly more than welcome to share my food, though I don’t know if it would be enough for your entire party. You see, I’m here only on the weekends, and at such times I bring along just enough for myself and whatever guests are coming. I don’t keep much on hand here, because the field mice will get in it if I do, and the ants and beetles and so on...”
“Pardon me,” said Wonk. “What was that?”
Abnormal Occurrences: Short Stories Page 3
