by Bob Shaw
Willett gazed helplessly at Gina’s neat, hard face, then inspiration came to him. His nephew had observed the phenomenon a good nine months earlier—a fact which demolished Gina’s claim that the refrigerator had been without a conventional power-source for only a matter of minutes. How would she wriggle out of that one? He was opening his mouth to challenge Gina when the telephone warbled. It was only a pace away from him, mounted on the tiled wall, and the unexpected loudness of it made him jump.
Gina took the handset and spoke her number into it. She listened for a short time, nodding and making little sounds of agreement, then said, “Don’t worry about the car, Muriel—the important thing is that you’re all right. Cars can easily be mended.”
On hearing his wife’s name and references to car damage, Willett moved closer to the phone, his heart lapsing into a bumping and unsteady rhythm.
“Yes, he’s right beside me,” Gina said into the instrument. Her eyes were watchful as she handed it over to Willett.
“What have you done, Muriel?” he said harshly. “What have you done to my car?”
“That’s all you think about! Your rotten, old car!” His wife had gone on the offensive immediately, which meant she had done something costly. “It doesn’t matter about me, does it? I could be seriously injured and you wouldn’t even…”
“The car, Muriel! What happened?”
There was a brief silence, then Muriel said, “I decided to put it into the garage to save you doing it when you got back, and…and it wouldn’t stop for me. When I pressed the brake the car went faster.”
“When you pressed the brake the car went faster.” Willett repeated the sentence in dull, noncommittal tones, hoping that merely hearing her own words would impress on Muriel just how nonsensical they were.
“That’s what I said.” Muriel sounded unrepentant.
Willett gave a deep sigh. “Muriel, if the car went faster you must have pressed the accelerator.”
“Willett, I’m not stupid—I know the difference between the accelerator and the brake,” Muriel said indignantly. “Anyway, your lathe got knocked over, and the back window of the car fell out.”
“My lathe!” Suddenly the giant Jubilee clip was again in place around Willett’s chest, squeezing inwards. “I’m coming home.” He hung up the phone, brushed past Gina without speaking and headed for the front door.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” Gina called in his wake. “What about the icing sugar?”
“Stuff the icing sugar!” Willett snarled. Out in the avenue he set off in the direction of his house at a very fast walking pace, but within a few yards made the chastening discovery that the pressure in his chest had turned into actual pain. That’s the way they get you, he could almost hear Hank Beveridge saying. They kill you by making you kill yourself.
He immediately slowed to an amble and began the measured breathing he had been told was an aid to relaxation. The pain in his chest subsided reluctantly, producing a flicker of discomfort every now and then as he made his way home through shallow drifts of fallen cherry blossoms. The candle-coloured lights of the Rifleman’s beckoned in the distance, but he was not tempted. It had been a mistake, he now realised, to drink so much whisky in such a short time. The spirituous liquor was firing up his whole system just when it was imperative for him to be calm and cool. It had also given Gina the advantage of him, but then it had always been hard to best her in an argument. Look at the time…
Willett’s pace slowed even further and a cool breeze seemed to touch his brow as his memory stirred again, projecting an image of the past on to the screen of the present. On his doctor’s advice he had quit smoking more than ten years earlier, but he kept a large, urn-shaped lighter of solid silver on a bookcase in the living room. It contained neither batteries nor fuel, and was preserved purely as an ornament.
One Sunday afternoon, the summer before last, Willett had been tending the potted begonias on the rear patio while his wife entertained her mother and three sisters to tea. He had glanced in through the window just in time to see Anne—second youngest of the sisters—go to the bookcase, pick up the lighter and ignite her cigarette with it. Puzzled, because he did not think Muriel would have had the lighter serviced, he had gone into the house and examined it—and had found it still without batteries or fuel. When asked what he was doing Willett had related what he had seen through the window. For a moment Anne had seemed flustered, but Gina Sturmey had chimed in at that point with a scornful laugh, saying that Anne had already been smoking when she had casually picked up the lighter. Anne had quickly agreed with her.
Willett had not dared contradict the women when the facts were so plainly against him, but the image of Anne drawing flame from the lighter had always remained sharp in his mind, an irritating anomaly, a thorn in the flesh of reason and logic. And now, suddenly, a pattern was emerging—because the incident with the refrigerator was exactly the same kind of phenomenon.
Gina Sturmey and her daughters were witches who could make defunct machines operate as though they were in perfect condition!
“I’ve gone crazy,” Willett announced to the empty street. “I’m worse than old Hank ever was!”
Paradoxically, the realisation of just how far he had strayed beyond the bounds of rationality served to ease his mind. He was an engineer, and he knew that he lived in an ordered universe, and the conclusion he had reached about his in-laws was an example of what could come from abandoning strict causality. Witches, indeed! Giving a self-deprecating snort, Willett tried to summon up some reserves of steadiness and commonsense. All right, so his wife had damaged the car and there was something he did not understand about an old refrigerator—was that sufficient reason to go round the twist or have a heart attack?
Besides, his theory about the Sturmey witches failed the most basic test in that it did not accommodate all the facts. Even if he discarded the antique notion of witchcraft and enlisted the aid of modern jargon terms like “psi powers”, he had not explained why Gina and her brood were so spectacularly inept when it came to machinery or anything technical. If they had a natural or supernatural ability to impress their will directly on machines, they ought to display an effortless mastery of all such objects. Or should they? Would that not be giving the game away?
Willett snorted again in the scented darkness as he entered the spirit of the mental game he had just discovered. No thinker liked to abandon a neat theory without a struggle, and here was an intellectual challenge—reconcile the Sturmeys’ covert affinity with machines and their overt lack of such affinity.
There was a contradiction there, but did it really exist? Did it baulk in his mind because he was making the mistake of thinking as a man who had always been fascinated by engineering? His wife in particular seemed to have an antipathy towards all things mechanical, but what if that was according them too much importance in her scheme of things? She would not hate anything she saw as insignificant—she would simply regard it with disdain. All the Sturmeys could be the same. When it was necessary or convenient they might cause a broken machine to do their bidding, by one means or another, but for the sake of a quiet life they would not flaunt their power in the faces of their husbands and the world at large. The poor male spouses, exemplified by Willett, clinging to their cherished illusions of superiority, might not be able to stand it if all their hard-won understanding of torque and templates, degaussing and differentials amounted to nothing beside their wives’ instinctive and casual mechanical wizardry.
That’s not bad, Willett told himself, nodding in satisfaction. Perhaps I should take up writing fantasy stories as a hobby. I wouldn’t mind seeing my name on one of those paperbacks in Smith’s (comparable to Tolkien at his best), but the theory is still incomplete.
All right, let us suppose that the Sturmeys are modern witches, psi superwomen, and want to be discreet about it—why do they deem it necessary to go so far in the opposite direction and appear to be technological dunces? Take Muriel as an
example. If she wants to learn to drive why doesn’t she do so with remarkable competence, rather than put on a show of being so monumentally inept?
“I’m surprised you even bother to ask that question, old son,” said the ghost of Hank Beveridge, conjured up and made almost tangible by the vividness of Willett’s memory. “You’ve become redundant. Perhaps it’s because Muriel would like to go with the others on that winter cruise, but—whatever the reason—she has decided you’re for the high jump. It’s the insurance policy time. I warned you about the driving lessons, old son. The ultimate weapon! She’s killing you by making you kill yourself…”
“Cobblers,” Willett muttered, disappointed by his failure to build a satisfactory armature of logic to support the witch theory at his first attempt. There was no time for a second try because the game was over—he was coming within sight of his own house and the glimmer of the garage lights was a reminder of what was waiting for him there.
In spite of all his sensible resolutions, he was unable to prevent an anxious quickening of his pace over the last hundred yards and was breathing heavily by the time he entered the driveway. Muriel was waiting under the porch light. She had changed her clothes and was now wearing a grey pullover, grey tweed skirt and low-heeled shoes.
That must be her I’ve-just-crashed-the-car outfit, Willett thought bitterly, wondering how his wife could concern herself with her appearance at a time of crisis. He nodded with grave courtesy as he passed her, calculating that a show of forbearance would increase her burden of guilt, and went into the garage. An involuntary moan escaped his lips as he saw that the lathe had not only been knocked over—it had been driven against the wall so hard that several breeze-blocks had been displaced outwards. The rear end of the car had been crunched into an expensive new free-form shape and the hatchback window, miraculously intact, was lying on the floor beside it. Willett’s lower lip began to tremble while he was surveying the full extent of the catastrophe, but he brought it under control as Muriel entered the garage and came to his side.
“Thanks a lot,” he said. “This is a nice little home-coming present.”
“Don’t be sarcastic with me, Willett Morris,” she snapped. “It was all the fault of your stupid old car.”
“Are you going to persist with this crap about the car going faster when you pressed the brake?”
“That’s what happened. It must be something to do with a…” Muriel paused, rummaging through her small vocabulary of engineering terms. “…a linkage.”
“Linkage! You haven’t the foggiest bloody idea what you’re talking about, woman.” Willett was unable to prevent his voice ascending in both pitch and volume. “You pressed the wrong bloody pedal—and you haven’t even the bloody decency to apologise.”
“Apologise!” Muriel faced up to him and, far from being apologetic, her eyes were bleak and baleful in a way that was outside his previous experience. “Why don’t you get in and drive the car yourself? Why don’t you prove me wrong?”
“That’s easily done,” Willett shouted, aware that the steel hoop was remorselessly crushing his chest. Ignoring the pain, he got into the driving seat, slammed the door and switched on the engine with the key Muriel had left in the lock. He revved up loudly to express his fury, put the car in gear and sent it surging out of the garage. Halfway along the drive he stamped on the brake, intending to give a spectacular demonstration of the car’s stopping ability, but to his horror the vehicle leapt forward with frightening power.
Willett was unable to control the reflex which caused him to bear down on the brake pedal with all his strength. The engine roared and the car hurtled between the gate posts, gaining speed all the while, crossed the avenue in an instant and mounted the opposite footpath. Willett barely had time to see the stone wall which spanned the view ahead, before the appalling impact drove him against the steering wheel. Two sources of pain, one external and one from within, fused in his chest, going beyond what was humanly endurable as his body bounced and broke and finally came to rest in a grotesque kneeling position beneath the dashboard.
Willett found himself with his face almost jammed against the instrument panel, and the car—as though rewarding him for all the attention he had lavished on it—began to put on a light-show to entertain him during the final seconds of his life. One by one the lights came on, plastic tablets glowing with cheerful colours, and there among them was the oil pressure warning light with its picture of an oilcan. Seen from a distance of only a few inches, the symbol loomed large in his field of vision, exhibiting fine details he had never noticed before. Very oddly—for an oilcan—its spout ended in what looked like the perforated spray head of a watering can.
Muriel, don’t do this to me, Willett pleaded inwardly, drowning in blood, as he saw the can begin to move. It tilted itself and sprinkled droplets of water over a stylised daisy. The daisy became invigorated, with Disney-style quiverings, and strained up towards the sun…
But by that time Willett was dead, and Muriel was hurrying to telephone her mother.
DISSOLUTE DIPLOMAT
Gringledoonk lay in a comfortable floor dish, experimenting with himself out of sheer boredom. From three points along his perimeter he projected slim pseudopods, intertwined them for a short distance in the centre, then split the end of each in two and looped them out to form six little hooks.
Listlessly he solidified the edifice and extruded an eye to examine it. It did not look like much.
There were several races in the Federation who covered their bodies with fabrics, and this thing he had made might have been useful to one of them, but not to anybody civilised. More bored than ever, he commenced the slow process of dissolving the hardened pseudopods.
A low whistle came from the entrance of the tubeway in the palace wall. The little circular door opened and Mugg, his Minister of Home Affairs, shot out on to the floor. He lay for a moment in the bullet shape that Gyoinks used for travelling the tubeway; then he re-formed and flowed into the floor dish beside Gringledoonk.
When he had stopped rippling, Mugg extruded an eye and, on seeing the peculiar shape his ruler had assumed, kept popping out more and bigger eyes to get a better view. Gringledoonk watched the process with disgust. No matter how often he was told about it, Mugg never seemed to realise how ill-mannered such displays of curiosity were.
“What,” Mugg finally enquired, “have you done to yourself, Your Softness?”
“Never mind that,” Gringledoonk said irritably. “Why did you come here? You know this is my rest period.”
“It’s important,” Mugg replied. “A spaceship on normal drive has entered the system and is heading for this planet.”
For an instant Gringledoonk lost the cool green colouring that befitted his position and allowed his natural mottled orange to show through. “What? What sort of a spaceship?”
“It appears to be a Terran ship, Your Fluidity.”
“The Treaty does not allow Terran ships to land here,” Gringledoonk said. “This is most unexpected. We’ll have to check the libraries on how to receive the officers of a Terran ship.”
He moved out of his dish, balancing the still rigid tripod with difficulty, and into the entrance port of the tubeway. The soft, warm radiance there helped him dissolve and reabsorb the cumbersome extension, and he vanished into the narrow aperture of the tubeway.
After years of inactivity, Gringledoonk, Lord and Representative of the Gyoinks, was back in business.
Hal Portman was holding a moderate 800C when his warp-drive generators gave a low sigh and vanished into some unknown dimension. The ancient Morris Starcruiser emerged into normal space with a sickening jiggle.
On checking his position, Portman found that there was a planet called Yoink so close, astronomically speaking, that he could have spat on it. He tapped out Yoink’s coordinates on his destination selector and began drinking beer in preparation.
Two days and thirty-two cans of beer later, the Starcruiser bulleted down for a land
ing.
Wiping white froth from his bristly upper lip, Portman opened the lock and went down on to springy yellow turf. He found himself surrounded by a varicoloured crowd of beings of indeterminate shape who chittered at him excitedly. He could not decide whether their agitation was due to the sudden appearance of his ship or the fact that it seemed to have crushed a number of their plastic buildings on arrival.
He drew his sidearm and shouted, “Silence, friends. I am a citizen of—uh—Imperial Earth and I command your obedience. I want—”
One of the waist-high cones of jelly interrupted him by sprouting an enormous mouth and bellowing something about violations of the Treaty. Portman gave the little alien a short burst from his Colt .45 which reduced it to a pile of crackling cinders.
“You’re only saying that because you’re jellos,” he joked hastily, feeling that it might be better to pass the incident off. The directory had stated that the Gyoinks were non-aggressive, but there was no point in not acting in a friendly manner. He knew about the Treaty, but the cargo of contraband luminous furs that he had tucked away would have caused unwelcome comment if he had waited for an AA repair ship.
“Now listen, friends,” he repeated, brandishing the weapon. “We’ll get along as long as nobody argues or tries to get funny. My ship has broken down. Replace the warp generators and I’ll be on my way.”
“Imperial Earth will be grateful,” he added as an afterthought. This diplomacy stuff was a cinch for a guy who knew how to handle people and things.
