BELIEVE IN TANGIBLES, by Everil Worrell
First publication anywhere.
He could hear them talking outside his hospital room. His senses were hyper-acute; a hysterical condition, the doctors had told him. He thought it was an after effect of the radiation. Doctors weren’t always so smart. Dr. Johnson wasn’t too smart, or he’d remember those sharpened senses, and bullyrag the pretty student nurse somewhere else.
“You’ll sign—if he doesn’t change his story. You were a witness, and we’re going to use you,” he was mumbling low—but not low enough.
“You don’t need my signature, Doctor!” Brown Eyes sounded embattled. For him?—for Lester Norman, admitted last night with burns and—what were they calling it? Hallucinations? Or schizophrenia—maybe as bad as that.
“Good to have a witness beside the doctors, though!” opined Dr. Johnson. “Another name, you see, and one outside the profession. Since that dirty rag of a paper ran that check list of the number of lobotomies in this hospital and made it sound as if—”
Lobotomies?
Brown Eyes again: “I don’t agree with you and Dr. Chenkov. I don’t—didn’t think Mr. Norman—the patient was—is—a hysteric. I think he was telling a story that was—factual, to him, at least.”
The doctor’s big, hearty laugh boomed.
“Dear child! Ward M is full of people with stories that are factual—to them, at least!”
“All right, I still won’t sign. I won’t sign!”
“You’ll do as I tell you… You don’t think you’re just an ordinary student nurse, I hope?—You remember how you lost your former position—with the hospital supply company I hope?”
The girl’s voice rang like a fire alarm.
“Because I saw some figures being juggled and reported on it to the figure juggler. That’s why.”
“Lower your voice, please. Now, that’s your story! You never produced those papers you talked about—”
“They disappeared.” Now the voice was low. The alarm had rung itself out.
“Naturally. So—you were sent here for observation. And we gave you a vocational analysis, and—a chance.”
“A chance, for a statistical analyst fresh out of college! A chance to scrub and carry—”
“You seemed glad enough of it at the time.”
Again the young voice rose, but pitifully.
“I was afraid. Afraid you’d frame me too—”
“Well, naturally. Miss Kaye, you had to be stopped. Do you know what your I Q. really is? It’s high. Much too high for a curious young person to run around without supervision—I guaranteed your adaptability. I thought I could. I still think so. Things everywhere are quite well organized, and the organization is quite coordinated—intermeshed, as it were, with that I Q. of yours. I’m sure you get my meaning! You’ll sign! You can’t go against the treatment policies of the head of the hospital. Of Dr. Schwartz himself!”
There was what passed for silence. But somewhere a child skipped rope, counting; a fly buzzed out in the corridor. Lester Norman wriggled unhappily in his bed. His burns were healing fast, as no burns ever healed before; it was as though the radiation, or whatever, contained its own anodyne. If it didn’t kill you quick it helped you heal.
It wasn’t the burns that made him squirm, no. His nerves must be shot! Lobotomy. Oh—no! The doctor was talking about somebody else, when he used that word. Brown Eyes had dragged his name into it because—well, how does a girl’s mind work? She’d waited on him, maybe she liked him.
The sedatives took hold again. Forget that confused scrap of conversation. Sleep again. Sleep helps tissues heal and grow. Those two outside the door must have gone—No, now the doctor was really whispering.
“We want to keep him in good shape if he’ll conform,” he said. “Don’t agitate yourself, Miss Kaye. His story made sense, all but the last part of it. We’ll check that with him this evening. Perhaps by then—well, he’ll be reoriented back into the normal, tangible framework of things. Dr. Schwartz believes in giving the full treatment—but Dr. Chenkov and I—sometimes—”
“Oh—thank you!” There were tears in the voice.
So what of it? Brown Eyes might have a terrific IQ, and a propensity for talking out of turn and getting into trouble, but she was all girl. Soft faced, tender mouthed. Girls like that cried easily, probably. Valerie didn’t cry, but there was—only one Valerie. And Valerie—
Meet the sedatives half way, or they’d be no good.
Rubber soles flapped away. Outside a bird sang in the morning brightness. Lester Norman drifted off on the song in the light.
* * * *
At about sunset a strange nurse brought his supper tray and later removed it. The stars were out before he saw Brown Eyes again. She came in then, flanked by Dr. Johnson and Dr. Chenkov. They all sat down after fixing the room to suit them. Dr. Johnson turned off every light but one on the desk. There was a writing desk in the corner of this room, and Johnson sat at it, tilting the desk lamp down, and pulling a pad of paper from the drawer, to take notes. Chenkov fiddled with a box he’d carried in, and lifted out a tape recorder and a small playback. He set the thing to play, so it seemed they were all going to listen to something together.
Brown Byes sat in a straight chair, her eyes on Lester’s.
Now he could hear his own voice spinning back to him off the tape. He sounded as though his throat hurt. Well—it had.
“Six of us went on this canoeing and camping trip,” said Lester Norman via the tape. “Valerie Wood and I were together. Another couple, Peter Kyle, he was with Irene Snowden. The chaperones—they were the ones who planned it all, got up the trip—the couple who called themselves Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson. Such a very common name—for such a—”
The hoarse, tired voice trailed off. Dr. Johnson, unwound from the tape, curt and matter of fact: “People get on each other’s nerves on these camping trips,” he said. “Keep it easy, boy—nothing wrong with a good, common name like Wilson—my own being Johnson, I see nothing wrong with a name just because it covers pages in the directory.”
“These Wilsons weren’t in the directory, doctor,” the hoarse voice came back impatiently. “They were—strangers. Do you want me to tell this story?”
Silence. Then a long run of unbroken hoarse recording by himself; Lester Norman speaking again.
“It was Valerie who ran across the Wilsons everywhere. She liked them, and I don’t see why not. They turned up at all kinds of places she went to; they went to her church sometimes—Valerie belongs to St. Luke’s Episcopal. The Wilsons weren’t what they call regular communicants, you know. They went to church like they went to other places Valerie went to. They visited her little-theater group, not taking any part, just interested. Valerie was going to play the lead in a play benefit for CARE—the Wilsons were going to be sponsors, they had their name down on the list, and through that—Well, then they got round to the visiting stage. I had met them a time or two.
“But Wilson had turned up at places where he got that well acquainted with Pete Kyle, too. Kyle is one of our bright young physicists, you know; they sent him to London, somebody did, to the international conference on—something about the nature of magnetism and its electricity. I don’t know much about it, but I think it was that. Not my dish, science—”
Dr. Chenkov cut in.
“How well did you know Kyle—and his girl—before you all went camping together?”
“Not well at all,” said the tired voice. “Just barely. The Wilsons got us all together a little, and then said let’s all go camping and canoeing. Up the river; up the Potomac, you know. They knew all about it—well, Kyle said he’d been up there before. Between Cabin John and Great Falls, you can paddle a canoe, partly on the canal—there have been shacks thrown up here and there, you can rent them. The Wilsons attended to all that. They knew all abo
ut everything, and yet they were newcomers here. I don’t know where they ever told Valerie they came from—if they ever did. They mentioned—everyplace. All over this country and abroad, London, Paris.”
Dr. Johnson again. “Let’s not get into that. People do come to a place and learn more about it than the natives, lots of times. I know people in Washington who’ve never been through the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, for instance, and it is a bore… Let’s get on with the camping trip, shall we?”
Lester had gotten on with the camping trip then, telling it to the tape, which now told it back to him.
“So we went, we took three rented canoes, we spent a day—that was Saturday—sliding up the canal. It was kind of like a pleasant dream. Green-glass water, green banks lines with tall old trees and jungly growth, flowers like Queen Anne’s Lace, that white lacy stuff—white clouds and blue sky shining back at you from the water. It was—nice.”
The voice stopped and then went on.
“There was a cute little cabin all furnished, split into several rooms. A little kitchen—we’d brought along steaks, bacon, eggs, coffee, and stuff. We had dinner, played gin rummy a while and listened to some records. That was in the living room—the Wilsons said they’d sleep out there. Kyle and I had one bedroom, Valerie and Irene the other. It was a fine night… We all stepped outside and looked at the stars and talked about it. After the cards, that was. We turned in around midnight.
“Everything was quiet until—just after 2 A. M.”
There was a longer pause, this tine. The doctors had waited it out, let him take his time, tell it his own way.
“Two A. M. I slept with my watch on my wrist and it has a radium dial, and when I first woke up I glanced right at it, because I was dog tired after the long day and the paddling, and I didn’t know why I was awake, and I hoped there’d be hours yet before morning…you know the way.
“Well, I heard something in the living room next door, and at first I thought it was the Wilsons of course. But a minute afterward, there were these two men. They came through the door fast, the two crowding in almost together, and both had revolvers, and they were pointed right at us. One at me, and one at Kyle—there was enough light in the room to see; the moon came up late, but it shone right in through a west window. We could see, all right, and there was nothing to do about it.
“Get up and put on some clothes and be quick about it!” one of the men said. And I didn’t notice until then that both of them had handkerchiefs tied over their faces. It was like something in a movie. Just harmless people camping out—no money to speak of on us, no reason—
“We got up and slammed into our clothes, and I hoped they’d leave the girls alone. Maybe they didn’t know the girls were with us? And I wondered about the Wilsons, and why I didn’t hear a move from the living room. I wondered about the girls too, what was keeping them quiet, or if they were so tired none of this had waked them up, and I guessed that might be the case. But these two had come right in through the living room, and I couldn’t understand why there hadn’t been a fracas out there, or why I didn’t hear anything from the Wilsons now. Unless they had gotten them tied up someway and maybe gagged without any commotion, and that didn’t seem very likely.”
“Cut!” said Dr. Johnson.
Dr. Chenkov stopped the machine. “You take it here?” he asked his colleague.
“I take it here,” Dr. Johnson replied genially, mimicking Chenkov’s accent ever so lightly. There was a pause. Dr. Johnson turned round from the desk where he had been making notes, or jotting down ideas.
“That’s about as far as we’ll go with the tape, Lester,” he said. “That far, it tracks, it’s all right. I can throw the rest of it out. I can make another recording. I won’t even do that, right now. I’ll go over the facts with you—help you clear things up, untangle what really happened from what you—dreamed up in shock. Shock from the burns—and maybe a blow on the head that you didn’t remember last night—”
“No blow on the head!” Lester interjected.
“You don’t have to hurry into this, Lester. We’ll get it straight. One thing at a time. Now these masked men walked you and Peter Kyle down a steep trail, down a cliff to the edge of the river. It was rough going. First, they made the girls get up and dress and come out too, and you all went together, single file. You must have tried to help Valerie down the cliff, though—Maybe, right then, you had a fall?”
“No fall,” Lester said.
“Not, anyway, that you remembered in the excitement. Anyway, the Wilsons, they had already skipped out of the cabin—they didn’t show up.”
“They showed up,” Lester said doggedly. “They were there—in the—”
“We’ll come to that…
“The masked men made you get into a row boat, and took you out to one of the little islands in the wide part of the river there. Got you out of the boat, marched you up to another cabin—but this was a place in bad repair that hadn’t been used for a long time, a place nobody would drop in on for a long time—maybe, ever. And there the Wilsons were waiting for you!”
Yes, there the Wilsons had been waiting. Lester felt his heart pound, as it all came back, almost visually. He swung himself up, sitting, swung his feet out on the floor, and nobody stopped him.
“They were there—but they were—different. Not a man and a woman any more, Dr, Johnson, Not people—”
Dr. Johnson sighed, tapped the cap of his fountain pen against his teeth, swiveled to fix a hard stare on Lester.
“Do you—even partly—realize how that sort of thing sounds?” he demanded.
“Do you realize—even partly what it was like to see them—with the same faces, same body build, even clothing and—shining in the dark—” Lester retorted.
“Skip that. They paid off the two thugs who had kidnapped you—”
“That’s right. They did. Mr. Wilson said something like had they carried out instructions, had they been—courteous, I think he said—a queer word for it— They said they had. They were scared too—of course. They grabbed the money and left in the boat. Then Mrs. Wilson said, ‘You were less frightened by two thugs than you would have been if we had had you brought here by—others who, well, shine in the dark’—she used those very words, she said it herself, there was no hallucination.”
Dr. Johnson turned, at a gesture from Dr. Chenkov. “Yes?”
“Maybe they did shine in the dark, doctor,” offered Chenkov softly and diffidently, so that he sounded like Peter Lorre doing a nervous spy for the films. “Maybe they did! A little Halloween stuff, to overwhelm the young men, to make them capable of being manipulated?”
Dr, Johnson seized his pad and made a quick note.
“Possible, possible,” he said happily. “Yes, that would cover Lester’s obstinacy on that point. Incredibly fantastic, but not beyond the limits of the possible. We’ll keep that in mind.” He was happier about the whole thing. “You go on, now Lester. Take it from there,” he said kindly. “The Wilsons, somehow, had acquired a luminosity, and this rather overcame you—and Peter Kyle, and the girls. So, then?”
“Then they said—‘Please be at ease. Smoke if you like. Will you sit down at this table and take an I. Q. test for us?’
Wilson said that. The table was a broken down old board held up by upright logs nailed to the floor.”
Dr, Chenkov put up one hand, “May I interrupt? Please—This is to be quite off of the record. I was wondering—about that luminosity, the Wilsons shining that way, in the dark. By the way, was the place quite without light?”
“No,” Lester told him. “There was a smoky little lantern—but they lit it after we came in. They set it on the table, for us to write by. The table was just a broken down old board—”
“Yes, you told us. One gets the picture. My question—Did the Wilsons—Ah, capitalize on the luminous phenomenon—orally? Didn’
t they refer to it, make what one calls a point of it?—Beside the woman saying that other shining ones would frighten you—”
“Valerie asked Mrs. Wilson, She—She said something like—‘I thought my mind was—a little off. You are—bright, so bright, both of you. I’m really seeing it, aren’t I?’—And when Mrs. Wilson reassured her Valerie just asked Why? She meant why now, when they had been like—other people, before, always; and she meant How, too, of course—Mrs. Wilson answered in a way—She said—now they were bright again, because now they were getting ready to go—back.”
“Back?”
“Back where, you mean. Back home, I took it to mean. But where was home—Well, that came later, more or less. It’s part of—what you and Dr, Johnson object to—”
“Leave it there.” Dr. Johnson cut in.
The nurse had been fidgeting, and now she spoke.
“I’m supposed to do nothing but listen,” she said. “I’m Mr. Norman’s only friend here though. I believe in him. How can he get things straight with both of you interrupting—”
Dr. Johnson’s hand came down on her shoulder in the same swift motion that lifted him out of his chair. Surely she winced? The look on her face made coercion take on a more physical tinge. Lester Norman turned his own mind aside with almost physical force—it was dragging up to the foreground that word lobotomy. Dr. Johnson clinched the fear upon him. “It was our Dr. Schwartz, Lester, who finally stopped all the flying saucer talk,” he said. “People who said they saw them were sent to us. Dr. Schwartz ordered lobotomies in all cases. So now you—know.”
“I’m trying to give you what you want—I’m ready to take up any part of it in any order you like,” Lester said. “And to leave out—anything you want left out!”
Something hard went out of Dr. Johnson’s face. He removed his fingers from the girl’s shoulder, and she sighed a little and sat back in her chair.
“Tell us about the I. Q. test,” said Dr. Johnson. “Some of the questions, please. We had no trouble about that last night—take it easy, son. This will check—I’m interested in a check. They were peculiar questions—but we can all agree Ha! Ha!—that your Wilsons, whatever they were after with you, were—are peculiar people!”
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 49
