“Thought I might find you here,” he said. “Did you know you're a suspicious character? Whose watch did you hock today? Somebody called up and asked did I know you, and were you a solid citizen. So you owe me a drink on that."
“Sure, I'm loaded,” Casey said, “only weren't you with a party?"
Chad Stanton chuckled. “Just the office crowd,” he said, “and I'm better off over here, where I don't have to listen. We're bringing out a new title, next month—science fiction monthly—and the fellows will do their planning better when I'm not there to say no. How about that drink?"
Casey ordered it. He had to break a twenty, and Chad Stanton, used to his friend's near-empty wallet, whistled rudely. “Not whose watch did you hock, but whose bank did you rob?"
“None,” Casey said. “But it's a funny business, just the same. I'd like to tell you about it. Want to drop up to my room?"
“I can't make a night of it,” Stanton warned, “not even if you have a bottle of Haig and Haig. I've got a foot-deep slush pile to read for that science fiction magazine."
“And I've got a ... a client coming to sit for a portrait,” Casey said, “but stop in for a few minutes on you way home, will you?"
“Can do,” Stanton said. At five that afternoon he knocked at the hall door of Casey's bedroom. Casey brought him into the studio.
“It was about two-thirty in the morning,” he began, and told the whole story. Stanton blinked.
“If I read it in the slush pile, I'd laugh my head off,” he scoffed. “What had you been drinking?"
“A glass of cold milk,” Casey said in annoyance.
“Then you ought to stick to beer."
“Look, Chad, I'm serious. If not—if I'm crazy—where did the gold come from?"
Stanton squinted at the few shining grains still adhering to the palette. His comment was profane and unprintable. “Yes, it looks like gold all right."
“And look here,” Casey urged, handing him the sketch of Amarga. Stanton whistled, turning the sketch in his hands. “Oh, brother,” he said, “if that stable of dry-brush pushers we've got down there could see this! This is science fiction art—the real stuff! This is a Bug-Eyed Monster to end all BEMS! I never knew you could do fantasy art, Casey."
“I can't. I tell you, this was a life sketch,” Casey said. “I don't even read that crazy science fiction stuff."
“Maybe you ought to take up writing it, judging by that yarn you spun,” Stanton snorted. “Look, seriously, Casey—I don't handle the artwork over at the shop, but you work up that sketch into a painting, and show it to Donaldson, over at Vector Pubs. Tell him I said to think about featuring it for a cover, and we'll assign somebody to write a story around it."
“But Chad—” Casey began, then stopped at the sight of the other man's face; Stanton's mouth was open in a long O, his eyes bugged out, and he was staring fixedly at something just behind Casey. “Now I'm seeing it,” he yipped. “I must have been reading too much slush—gotta catch my train—gotta take a rest—” he gabbled, shut his eyes hard, turned and piled pell-mell down the stairs. Casey turned slowly around, not in a hurry to see what he knew Stanton had seen: Roald Ruill's feathery green skull, sticking out of the wallpaper.
“Come right in,” Casey said bitterly. He'd better keep the man from the future in a good humor; he was going to need whatever fee he got for Amarga's portrait. Chances were, he wouldn't sell anything more to Stanton after this!
* * * *
It had taken a week; Amarga had come for three more sittings, and now the painting was finished. They were to come for it tonight.
Casey liked it, weird as it was. Amarga had a special beauty; not a human beauty, of course, but you couldn't have everything.
If only they liked it! Neither of them had looked at the sketch; Roald Ruill had twittered something kind about not being worthy to watch the incubation process of the creative mind, and Amarga had told him, in her skrilling coloratura, that she simply adored surprises.
It was a perfect likeness. Amarga stood, as if living, on the canvas before him. Casey felt that one minute of pure, perfect self-satisfaction, the aftermath of all the painful sweats which go into making anything, whether a picture or a piecrust. Casey looked at his picture and saw that it was good, the best thing he'd ever painted. He'd have to give it up soon enough, so right now he meant to sit and admire it for a minute or two.
The materialization process no longer scared him. When Amarga and Roald Ruill walked out of the wall, he merely greeted them with a cordial grin.
“This is a great moment in history—in future history,” Roald Ruill said pompously. “Amarga, my dear, you must have first look at the portrait."
Casey stood back, giving way to Amarga. Roald Ruill edged behind her.
They looked at the picture for some moments in silence. Roald Ruill paled to a minty shade of palest green; then suddenly his face congested to indigo, and Amarga gave a soprano shriek. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, it's horrible!"
She flung up her long spidery fingers to her eyes and vanished.
“You don't like it?” Casey asked numbly, and from nowhere, her bodiless voice wailed, “Like it!"
Roald Ruill came at him, angrily. “Is it your intention, Casey, to mock the generations who have revered your name? To insult my daughter?"
Casey stared, stunned, at the almost-breathing picture of Amarga. “Insult her?” he faltered, “nothing could be further from my mind! I did the best—"
“You have painted her as inhuman!” Ruill thundered.
“Well,” Casey stammered, “Well, she doesn't look ... exactly like the ... human women I've painted, but I painted her as she is, as beautifully as—"
Roald Ruill's face went through a whole palette of greens and blues. “Would you flaunt our mutations in our faces?” he demanded. “How would you paint any woman of Earth, as other than human? Why, you wretched scrawler, if I wanted to see Amarga as she is, I would look in a mirror!” He spoke it as one speaks a disgustingly filthy epithet. “As if anyone ever painted what he saw! Have you no artistic sense of interpretation? You painted only her form—and painted it indecently—and with no psychological insight whatsoever! Where is her basic humanity? Where are her thoughts? Where are the beautiful telepathic projections of her innocent soul? This ... this obscene scrawl—"
Casey tried to check the flow of rapid words.
“Look here. Roald Ruill, I didn't think—in our era, it's customary to paint a portrait so it looks like the subject—"
“Ridiculous!” Roald Ruill stabbed with an angry long finger at the pin-up nudes on the wall. “Do you look like that?"
“Well, no, but then, you see—"
“And that proves it,” Roald Ruill said triumphantly. “I don't know why I stand arguing with an ignorant moron of the pre-space era! One school of criticism has always maintained that pre-space man had no creativity, and that his so-called art is on a level with the scrawls of a child. Now I have evidence to support this theory! You say, Casey—” he omitted the “Great” this time “—that you painted Amarga as you saw her? Then where are her sexual attributes? Why, one would never know whether she was male or female! You might at least have followed the ordinary conventions of decency! As for this ... this—” he went an incoherent purple, touching with angry, trembling fingers the painted feathery topknot on Amarga's skull, “even after what we said about the ... the lewd indecency of organic substance on the body, you had the ... the effrontery to paint her—” his face ran the whole gamut of colors, green ice to pine-cone, “with hair, and wearing ... wearing clothing!"
Casey was angry now. “Well, she was wearing clothing,” he flung at Roald Ruill. Damn it, how could he have known about their dim-witted conventions?
Roald Ruill snorted, “Some concessions to the climate must be made—but sane and decent people do not mention them in polite society!” He flung the painting to the floor. “This ... this daub would be of interest only to the Council on Abnorm
al Psychology! Believe me, when I get back to my own time, I will explode the whole Casey myth! The so-called Eternity Fragment which calls you the greatest, must be a hoax!"
Roald Ruill was gone, like a whisper of air, and Casey swore fervently, seeing his fee and a week's work going glimmering. The room was empty; Casey wondered if he were sleepwalking, if the whole thing had been a bizarre nightmare. No, for Amarga's portrait lay at his feet where Roald Ruill had thrown it. Casey raised his foot, ready to stamp through the useless, stupid, cheating face; then he jerked back his foot, so suddenly that he almost fell. He steadied himself on the easel, stooped, and tenderly picked up the portrait. He hunted up a piece of brown wrapping paper and a string, and twenty minutes later, went out into the street. The editorial offices of Vector Publications didn't close till six. He could just about make it.
* * * *
And everybody in the science fiction world knows the rest—the gorgeous six-color cover on the first issue of Eternity Science Fiction Novels, the story written around the cover by Theodore Sturgeon, the guest editorial on “The Nonhuman in Science Fiction Art.” The original painting, auctioned off at the science fiction convention, sold for two hundred dollars.
No other of Casey's paintings ever won quite so much fame, though he sold steadily to the science fiction magazines after that, and twice won a Hugo as “Artist of the Year."
He was fairly well-satisfied with his modest success, though his family always wondered why he should waste his talents illustrating “escapist rubbish.” His nagging maiden aunt (she of the orange polka-dotted pajamas) once asked him point-blank:
“Why don't you paint something worth while, something to make a name for yourself? This here-today-and-gone-tomorrow stuff, it's only good for waste paper! These crackpot science fiction fans may call you the greatest, but fifty years from now, none of these cheap magazines will be around—and your name will be completely forgotten!"
“Hah,” said Casey—but only to himself, for he was almost always polite to old ladies, “that's what you think!"
* * *
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