Yondering

by Robert Reginald (ed)

  The maid brought the matches and a cut-crystal ashtray. Laura waved her away. “Yes, and I’m your daughter, remember? I don’t care how you look. I was terribly worried about you.”

  “Thank you, darling.”

  Have you seen the news?”

  “Again with the news. Always with the news. I told you never to marry a politician, remember? I told you to marry Murray Taschen, who had his own money and would have given you a happy life.”

  “Murray Taschen is dead, Mother,” Laura said.

  “May he rest in peace, you would have been a wealthy widow; and you wouldn’t have to work yourself to the bone and prostitute your talent so the Schmuck can afford to stay in office.”

  “Don’t call him that.”

  “You do.”

  “Mother, goddammit, turn on the visual right now. I can’t talk to you like this.”

  “If you want to see me, come back to Melbourne and buy me lunch at Vito’s. I’m dying to walk down Collins Street again. I haven’t done that since the riots.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “And why not?”

  “Well, first of all, I’ve got Hannah home today. The school called another day of prayer because of the shortfalls, and it’s the nanny’s day off.”

  “You’re too lax with your help,” her mother said.

  “She’s always off on Wednesdays, Mother; and as you well know, my travel-pass is good only for Thursdays and Saturdays.”

  “The Schmuck has his diplomatic pass. You’re his wife. God, even the Premier’s wife has an unrestricted pass.”

  “I’m not the Premier’s wife,” Laura said.

  “Obviously.”

  “Mother, I only called to see if you were all right…and, obviously, you’re all right, so I’ll hang—”

  “And why shouldn’t I be all right?” her mother said placatingly.

  “Because your shahid neighbor martyred himself in your temple this morning.”

  “My temple?”

  “Unless there’s another Beth David Synagogue on Grey Street, half a block away from you,” Laura said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear the explosion…or feel the vibrations.”

  Her mother didn’t respond.

  “You shut down your implants, didn’t you,” Laura said, sighing.

  “It’s the only way I can get a good night’s sleep,” her mother said.

  “Well, thank the good Lord you weren’t there. I was so worried, because you’re always at the temple on Wednesday mornings.”

  “I slept in,” her mother said very quietly.

  “Mother, turn on the damn visuals.”

  “I haven’t been feeling up to par,” she said vaguely. Then, “Did anyone survive the martyrdom?”

  “No, Mother, the synagogue and the Catholic hospital complex next to it were completely destroyed,” Laura said. “Worse than the Opera House. Now do you see why I was calling you?”

  “My neighbor…you said my neighbor. You don’t mean the Ghandour family? You don’t mean Mohammed, do you…?”

  “Yes, I think his name was something like that.”

  “He’s such a lovely boy. He lives right next door in 11 E. He always brings me presents.”

  “He brings you presents?”

  “Yes…presents.”

  “What does he bring you…what did he bring you?

  “Just presents,” her mother answered; and then dead silence.

  Laura called to her.

  The line was still intact.

  “Mother. Mother…? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, dear. Don’t be so impatient.”

  “I was just about to call emergency. I think I’d better call a doctor for you anyway.”

  “I just checked the news,” her mother said, ignoring Laura’s threat to call the doctor. “Terrible…terrible. Yes, it was Mohammed. He saved me. I told him I was going to stay home today. I’m sure that’s why he picked today. Well, he told me that paradise was right in front of his eyes. I should have known something was up when he said it was just beneath his thumb.”

  “You’re talking utter nonsense.”

  Her mother sighed and said, “Your sister Lorraine was always the smart one in the family, but she wouldn’t call me if I was dying.”

  “Yes, she would, Mother.”

  “So, now you’ve got the business and most of my money, and you’re as dum—” She stopped herself and said, “I haven’t got your university education, and I understand what Mohammed meant.”

  “And what was that, mother?” Laura said coldly.

  “He meant that a detonator lies beneath his thumb.” She paused, then said, “I must have some flowers sent to his parents.”

  “I thought you said you checked the news. His mother and father were both in the temple.”

  “Whatever for? They’re Muslims.”

  “How would I know?” Laura said. “You know all the answers. Go find Lorraine and ask her.”

  “Wait,” Laura’s mother said and checked the news again. “Ah…it was the ecumenical breakfast. It’s a big deal. The mayor and the bishop and that blind teli-minister who speaks in tongues—and God only knows who else—will have been there. I’m surprised your husband wasn’t in attendance.”

  “He’s in Canberra, Mother.”

  Laura’s mother sighed and said, “Mohammed shouldn’t have carried his parents away with him, but he once told me—”

  “Told you what, Mother?” Laura insisted.

  “That he belongs to God…and that an angel came down from Heaven to tell him that God is going to take revenge on all religions, on all the churches, mosques, and synagogues.”

  “And you never thought it might be an idea to report that to the authorities?” At that moment little Hannah ran into Laura’s study. She had her mother’s white-blonde hair and dimples, and she was wearing pearl pink jodhpurs and a matching pearl-neck cardigan.

  “Mommy, who are you talking to? Daddy?” The little girl looked around and said, “He’s not here.” Then in a hushed voice: “Are you talking to…Grandpa?”

  “Grandpa’s in Heaven, honey, remember?”

  Hannah nodded sagely. “Uh, huh, I remember, that’s why I thought maybe you were talking to him.”

  “Go put some shoes on. You’ll get a sliver in your foot running around like that.”

  She balanced on one foot and held the other one in her hand. “Were you talking to Grandpa’s ghost? I talk to angels in the garden, but you can see them.”

  “No, Hannah, I wasn’t talking to Grandpa’s ghost. At least he would have made some sense. I was talking to your pigheaded grandmother, who is in the process of going completely mad and has forgotten all her manners.”

  “Grandma doesn’t have a pig head, and she doesn’t get mad all the time like you,” Hannah said, scowling and dropping back onto two feet.

  “That’s right, baby,” Laura’s mother said.

  Her image suddenly appeared big as life and in high-definition color and contrast in the center of the room. She wore an appropriate sea blue night-dress, privacy veil, and a satin mourning scarf. “Mommy’s being very mean to Grandma,” she said to her granddaughter as she petted a brown and white masked beagle puppy that was wriggling around on her lap.

  “She’s mean to me, too,” Hannah said; and then suddenly realizing that there was a puppy on her grandmother’s lap, she shrieked with joy. “I want to pat the puppy too, is that your puppy? where’d you get him, Mommy, I want a puppy too, why can’t I have one? is that one for me, Grandma?”

  “This puppy’s mine, sweetheart,” Hannah’s grandmother said. “He was a present. It’s up to your Mommy and Daddy whether or not you get a dog.” She turned her gaze meaningfully to Laura.

  “Go put your shoes on. Mommy’s talking to Grandma.”

  “What’s the puppy’s name, Grandma?”

  “Henry, he’s named after your grandfather.”

  “If I had a dog, I’d name him after you, Gra
ndma,” Hannah said.

  “Lorelei would be a nice name if you have a female dog, but what if it’s a male?”

  “It won’t be,” Hannah said with authority. “And when I get one, I’m going to name it Old Oar after you.”

  “That’s not my name, Lorelei said, smiling. “Now where on earth did you get that name from?”

  “From Daddy.”

  “Ah….”

  “Shoes. Now!” Laura shouted, and Hannah skipped out of the room, banging the Hindu temple door back against the wall.

  “Old Oar, hey?” Lorelei said.

  “Mother….”

  “I may be a whore, darling, but I am certainly not old. The fact that the Schmuck always talks to my bust proves that something about me must be youthful.” Indeed, Lorelei looked as young as her daughter, who had her mother’s features, especially the thin, aquiline nose. Although Laura was attractive, Lorelei was beautiful. Perhaps that explained why the media, especially the paparazzi, still called out for Lorelei at Marchette mannequin parades.

  “Mother, Jason is just—”

  “A schmuck.”

  “Look, Mother, I’ve got to go. As long as you’re all right, that’s all that concerns me.”

  “Don’t you want to know who gave me the dog?” Lorelei asked.

  “No.”

  “And what’s this business about Hannah talking to angels in the garden?”

  “All children have imaginary friends,” Laura said.

  “She’s not getting enough attention.”

  “That’s all she gets is attention.”

  “She needs a companion.”

  “I’m not buying her a dog.”

  “I miss your father,” Lorelei said, as if it was something she just remembered.

  “Yes, Mother, I know you do.”

  Then Lorelei smiled with nostalgia and mumbled to herself, as if she had forgotten she was still on the line with her daughter. “At least Mohammed was interested in the ways of the flesh…if not in the ways of the world.”

  With that, Lorelei ended the connection; leaving Laura with nothing to do but light another Turkish cigarette, sit back down on her blue mohair velvet settee, call Helpless, and watch Hannah sneaking shoeless back into the garden to talk with the angels.

  ULTRA EVOLUTION, by John Russell Fearn

  The vision of an ambulance hurtling through the London streets in the early evening, blasting a path by the savage clanging of its bell, is enough to stir almost anybody from preoccupation, and to a reporter like me it is a positive clarion call. I was just coming out of the doorway of the London Argus when the white vehicle swept by, took the danger traffic lights at full speed, and carried on up the main road.

  One thing registered automatically in my mind—a story—and even as I thought of it I had my own car engine roaring, whipped away from the curb, and raced with a supreme disregard for all law and order in the wake of the hurtling ambulance. As it was white I could follow it without difficulty under the high, swinging street lamps. I trailed it for four miles or so, out of the heart of the city to the lordly dignity of West Kensington. Finally the ambulance pulled up outside a residence in Kennedy’s Crescent.

  I jammed on my brakes, killed the ignition, then scrambled out of my car to join the ambulance men as they opened the rear of the vehicle and pulled forth a stretcher.

  “What goes on?” I asked, and Tony, the ambulance driver whom I knew well, turned to me in surprise.

  “You would be here,” he commented dryly. “What do you do, smell these things out?”

  “Official secret,” I told him.

  “Well, I don’t think there’s much to interest you,” he said, heaving his end of the stretcher into his hands. “It isn’t a murder, and there’s nothing lying around that even resembles a crime!”

  I glanced back at the great shadowy house. For all the signs of life there were, it might have been deserted for months. There was not even a glow behind the shades.

  “Somebody phoned from here,” Tony said, as I followed him up the front path. “Said he was dying—all alone—and to pick him up at once. Chap by the name of Dale Cavendish.”

  I frowned, recalling something. We had found the front door open, and had stepped into the hall. It was here that it dawned on me where I’d heard the name before. Dale Cavendish! Of course! He had been scientific reporter on the Daily Planet about five years back.

  No story? Well, I was beginning to feel interested, anyway.

  I switched on the hall lights, and we three men glanced about us in mystification for a moment. There was nobody around. Then from somewhere down the corridor that led off the hall came a faint cry: “Here…in here!”

  Immediately we hurried along to a doorway through which high ceiling globes were casting a curious shadowless glow upon the room beyond.

  “Gosh!” Tony exclaimed, “what do you make of it?”

  He said no more than this, since it was his job to attend to the man lying prone on the floor. He was not dead yet. He stirred flaccidly as the two ambulance men bent over him. I remained in the doorway, looking round a room which seemed to me to be an inchoate jumble of scientific apparatus, chiefly electromagnetic.

  I’m not very much of a scientist, but I did recognize electromagnetic apparatus of a pretty advanced type, together with banks of insulators, complicated control boards, and in the midst of it all, seeming somehow like the central focus of the whole mass of junk, an object like a gigantic enlarging camera depending from a girder athwart the ceiling, its narrowing end pointing towards the floor.

  All this equipment sort of registered in my brain in a matter of seconds; my real attention was centered on the man on the floor, about whom the two ambulance men were now working. He was not very old, no more than thirty-three or four, and even if his face had not been contorted through the pain of some mysterious illness he’d developed, he’d still have been mighty ugly. His nose was flat like a heavyweight’s, and his lips thick and sensual. Only his forehead redeemed him. It was massive beyond the normal, with disordered, dark hair, damp with the sweat of anguish, curling down it.

  It was Dale Cavendish all right, I recognized that map the moment I saw it—a bit older but still the face of the bad-tempered bloke who’d been the scientific reporter of the Daily Planet, until he had quit to do scientific research.

  “You’ll—never get me to a hospital,” he whispered to Tony as he kneeled beside him. “I telephoned and—and left the front door open just to—so’s you could take that….”

  He motioned weakly and closed his eyes for a moment. My gaze, and that of the ambulance men, moved to a machine rather like an outsized dictaphone standing on a bench. Like everything else in the place, it was confoundedly complicated and possessed a multitude of wires leading back to the switchboards.

  “It’s—a—” Dale Cavendish opened fading gray eyes for a moment, “—a—a thought—recorder. Everything’s in it. Don’t move it. Just—just—” He gulped for breath and twisted spasmodically. “Just press the red button and—and let the power run. It’ll—explain—”

  He was silent for a while, and then whispered a few further words.

  “He—managed it after all. Cleverer than I’d thought….”

  That definitely was the last statement Dale Cavendish made. Though the ambulance men rushed him to the hospital, he died on the way without further comments. So? Well, the police were informed, and scientific apparatus not being in their line, they asked Kensington Institute of Science to take a look around.

  I don’t know what they did or how they did it, but I do know that I was one of the reporters who heard the weird thought-recorder when it started explaining things. I’m hazy on the system it utilized, but the scientists who controlled it told us that thought vibrations had been imprisoned on sensitive vibration-reactive drums inside the thing, which in turn had been transformed into speech—or rather the words of the person who would have spoken had he been able. In a way it was like radio, onl
y instead of electronic impulses being converted into sound, thought was converted instead, into easily understandable words.

  That which follows is the story I noted down and which appeared condensed in the Argus, because my editor didn’t think the world in general was much interested in the doings of a rather obscure research scientist. My editor has no imagination, otherwise he’d have seen just how big an idea Dale Cavendish had really had.

  See what you think.…

  * * * *

  My name is Robert Jesmond, and through the thought-recorder I am able to tell you the true facts leading up to the death, the murder, if you like, of Dale Cavendish.

  Cavendish and I first became acquainted through both of us happening to know Ellen Fielding. Though Ellen does not figure much in what I have to tell, I do think that she was the cause of all the trouble, albeit unconsciously. I met her first at a staff dance given by the Scientific Institute. My position was that of a physicist, of the lower grade. I loved my work, but it had a habit of worrying me. Still, the pay was good and there was chance of promotion.

  So, when one of the boys in my department introduced me to Ellen, I was irritated with myself to think that a red-haired, blue-eyed charmer of her type had been in the clerking department all the time and I’d never noticed.

  “Bob Jesmond, eh?” she said, smiling and considering me under the bright lights as we sat together at the supper table after a pretty hectic evening. “I believe I’ve seen you now and again, come to think of it.”

  That was how it started off, and in an hour we were chatting as though we’d known each other all our lives. Then, as we were leaving the building, I insisted on seeing her home, our walk amongst the merrymakers to my car on the parking ground was interrupted by a tall man in an overcoat and soft hat barring our path. I didn’t know then who he was; all I did notice was that he was astonishingly ugly.

  “Why, Dale, hello!” Ellen exclaimed, glancing up at him. “So you managed to get along and meet me after all?”

  “I said I’d see you home if I could spare the time, didn’t I?”

  He had a quiet yet peculiarly hard voice, as though he were keeping himself in check.