"My wife," he tried to explain. "My—wife—is missing. My wife."
"Bee-yay," the woman said despairingly. "Vote bee-yay." She showed him a handful of dirham notes in large denominations.
"I wish I could understand what it is you want," he said.
She went away from him as though she were angry, as though he had said something to insult her.
Fred felt someone tugging at his shoe. He remembered, with a start of terror, waking in the cell, the old man tugging at his shoes, trying to steal them but not understanding apparently, about the laces.
It was only, after all, a shoeshine boy. He had already begun to brush Fred's shoes, which were, he could see, rather dirty. He pushed the boy away.
He had to go back to the hotel to see if his wife had returned there, but he hadn't the money for another taxi and there was no one in the waiting room that he dared trust with the bags.
Yet he couldn't leave Casablanca without his wife. Could he? But if he did stay, what was he to do, if the police would not listen to him?
At about ten o'clock the waiting room grew quiet. All that day no planes had entered or left the airfield. Everyone here was waiting for tomorrow's plane to London. How were so many people, and so much luggage, to fit on one plane, even the largest jet? Did they all have tickets?
They slept anywhere, on the hard benches, on newspapers on the concrete floor, on the narrow window ledges. Fred was one of the luckiest, because he could sleep on his three suitcases.
When he woke the next morning, he found that his passport and the two tickets had been stolen from his breast pocket. He still had his billfold, because he had slept on his back. It contained nine dirham.
Christmas morning, Fred went out and treated himself to an ice-cream sundae. Nobody seemed to be celebrating the holiday in Casablanca. Most of the shops in the ancient medina (where Fred had found a hotel room for three dirham a day) were open for business, while in the European quarter one couldn't tell if the stores were closed permanently or just for the day.
Going past the Belmonte, Fred stopped, as was his custom, to ask after his wife. The manager was very polite and said that nothing was known of Mrs. Richmond. The police had her description now.
Hoping to delay the moment when he sat down before the sundae, he walked to the post office and asked if there had been any answer to his telegram to the American Embassy in London. There had not.
When at last he did have his sundae, it didn't seem quite as good as he had remembered. There was so little of it! He sat down for an hour with his empty dish, watching the drizzling rain. He was alone in the ice-cream parlor. The windows of the travel agency across the street were covered up by a heavy metal shutter, from which the yellow paint was flaking.
The waiter came and sat down at Fred's table. "Il pleut, Monsieur Richmon. It rains. Il pleut."
"Yes, it does," said Fred. "It rains. It falls. Fall-out."
But the waiter had very little English. "Merry Christmas," he said. "Joyeux Noël. Merry Christmas."
Fred agreed.
When the drizzle had cleared a bit, Fred strolled to the United Nations Plaza and found a bench, under a palm tree, that was dry. Despite the cold and damp, he didn't want to return to his cramped hotel room and spend the rest of the day sitting on the edge of his bed.
Fred was by no means alone in the plaza. A number of figures in heavy wooden djelabas, with hoods over their heads, stood or sat on benches, or strolled in circles on the gravel paths. The djelabas made ideal raincoats … Fred had sold his own London Fog three days before for twenty dirham. He was getting better prices for his things now that he had learned to count in French.
The hardest lesson to learn (and he had not yet learned it) was to keep from thinking. When he could do that, he wouldn't be angry, or afraid.
At noon the whistle blew in the handsome tower at the end of the plaza, from the top of which one could see all of Casablanca in every direction. Fred took out the cheese sandwich from the pocket of his suit coat and ate it, a little bit at a time. Then he took out the chocolate bar with almonds. His mouth began to water.
A shoeshine boy scampered across the graveled circle and sat down in the damp at Fred's feet. He tried to lift Fred's foot and place it on his box.
"No," said Fred. "Go away."
"Monsieur, monsieur," the boy insisted. Or perhaps, "merci, merci."
Fred looked down guiltily at his shoes. They were very dirty. He hadn't had them shined in weeks.
The boy kept whistling those meaningless words at him. His gaze was fixed on Fred's chocolate bar. Fred pushed him away with the side of his foot. The boy grabbed for the candy. Fred struck him on the side of the head. The chocolate bar fell to the ground, not far from the boy's callused feet. The boy lay on his side, whimpering.
"You little sneak!" Fred shouted at him.
It was a clear-cut case of thievery. He was furious. He had a right to be furious. Standing up to his full height, his foot came down accidentally on the boy's rubbishy shoeshine box. The wood splintered.
The boy began to gabble at Fred in Arabic. He scurried forward on hands and knees to pick up the pieces of the box.
"You asked for this," Fred said. He kicked the boy in the ribs. The boy rolled with the blow, as though he were not unused to such treatment. "Little beggar! Thief!" Fred screamed.
He bent forward and tried to grasp a handhold in the boy's hair, but it was cut too close to his head, to prevent lice. Fred hit him again in the face, but now the boy was on his feet and running.
There was no use pursuing him, he was too fast, too fast.
Fred's face was violet and red, and his white hair, in need of a trim, straggled down over his flushed forehead. He had not noticed, while he was beating the boy, the group of Arabs, or Moslems, or whatever they were, that had gathered around him to watch. Fred could not read the expressions on their dark, wrinkly faces.
"Did you see that?" he asked loudly. "Did you see what that little thief tried to do? Did you see him try to steal … my candy bar?"
One of the men, in a long djelaba striped with brown, said something to Fred that sounded like so much gargling. Another, younger man, in European dress, struck Fred in the face. Fred teetered backward.
"Now see here!" He had no time to tell them he was an American citizen. The next blow caught him in the mouth, and he fell to the ground. Once he was lying on his back, the older men joined in in kicking him. Some kicked him in the ribs, others in his head, still others had to content themselves with his legs. Curiously, nobody went for his groin. The shoeshine boy watched from a distance, and when Fred was unconscious, came forward and removed his shoes. The young man who had first hit him removed his suit coat and his belt. Wisely, Fred had left his billfold behind at his hotel.
When he woke, he was sitting on the bench again. A policeman was addressing him in Arabic. Fred shook his head uncomprehendingly. His back hurt dreadfully, from when he had fallen to the ground. The policeman addressed him in French. He shivered. Their kicks had not damaged him so much as he had expected. Except for the young man, they had worn slippers instead of shoes. His face experienced only a dull ache, but there was blood all down the front of his shirt, and his mouth tasted of blood. He was cold, very cold.
The policeman went away, shaking his head.
At just that moment, Fred remembered the name of the Englishman who had had supper in his house in Florida. It was Cholmondeley, and it was pronounced Chum-ly. He was still unable to remember his London address.
Only when he tried to stand did he realize that his shoes were gone. The gravel hurt the tender soles of his bare feet. Fred was mortally certain that the shoeshine boy had stolen his shoes.
He sat back down on the bench with a groan. He hoped to hell he'd hurt the goddamn little son of a bitch. He hoped to hell he had. He grated his teeth together, wishing that he could get hold of him again. The little beggar. He'd kick him this time so that he'd remember it. The goddamn dirty litt
le red beggar. He'd kick his face in.
The End
© 1967 by Thomas M. Disch. First published in Stories That Scared Even Me, ed. Alfred Hitchcock, Random House, 1967.
Humpty Dumpty had a Great Fall
Frank Belknap Long
Kenneth Wayne was dressing for dinner when he heard the tapping. It was loud, insistent, and seemed to be saying: "No use pretending you're not at home, old man! I can hear you moving around in there!"
Wayne groaned. He had no desire to discuss vasomotor psychology with young Graham or polytonal music with the long-haired Dr. Raydel. He was dining out with a charming girl, and he wanted to stay alive, vital, every nerve alert to her beauty.
Wayne was one of those imaginative young men who attract ideas to themselves in the fashion of a baby specialist. Instead of babies, people brought him their budding ideas to admire.
Wayne told himself that he was a fool to be annoyed. The mere sight of his tux draped across a chair should discourage a talkative visitor. With an angry shrug he turned and crossed the room in three long strides. He threw the door wide.
The boy who stood in the doorway was a stranger to him. Boy? Well, it was hard not to think of the youngster as a man, for he was heavily bearded, and he carried himself with an air of maturity. But Wayne could see that he wasn't more that eighteen or nineteen years old. His clear blue eyes held the tortured look of the very young, and there was a newness about him which contrasted sharply with Wayne's aspect of world-weariness and cynicism. Wayne was only twenty-seven, but his age rested heavily upon him. His eyes were shadowed and the planes of his face craggy with thought.
"I'm Phillip Orban," the boy said. "I ran away. They were torturing me with their questions."
The Orban boy! Wayne shut his eyes while the universe reeled. Young Orban was carrying an enormous glowing loop of hollow metal. Before Wayne could cry out in protest the trembling lad had stepped into the room and set the loop down on the floor.
"Shut the door," Orban pleaded. "Lock it tight! If they try to get in, tell them I'm not in this room."
Mechanically, Wayne locked the door. When he turned, his lips were white.
"Why did you come here?" he demanded. "Do you realize I never saw you before in my life?"
The Orban boy nodded. "I hid in a cellar under an empty house. But I was cold and hungry. I had to come out. A policeman saw me, and I had to run for it. I never saw you before, but I like you. You will tell them I'm not here?"
Wayne made a despairing gesture. "All right!" he cried. "Did I say I wouldn't? Just take it easy now. Relax!"
It seemed to Wayne that standing before him was an impossible little gnome with a conical cap on his head, made visible by a dimensional vortex that was about to dissolve in a blaze of light.
That was absurd, of course! The Orban boy wasn't one of those mutant supermen freaks science-fiction writers were always speculating about. He was a quite normal youngster who had been trapped from infancy in the mind-numbing blackness of space.
But what would be the penalty for sheltering a boy with a price on his head, a boy about whom five million words had been written? Young Orban had committed a serious crime. An ugly crime! To get rid of a man by making him disappear was not a whit less ugly than cold-blooded murder!
Wayne stared down at the shining loop of metal, his eyes wide and incredulous. "Is that the machine you built?" he demanded, and was astonished that he could speak at all.
"It's the door I built!" Orban said. "I didn't push Dr. Bryce into it. He stumbled and fell."
"But how did you build it?" Wayne prodded. "You never saw a tool."
"There were tools in my father's workshop," Orban said quickly. "I knew how to build it. Dr. Bryce isn't dead. He's alive in the blue world."
Structurally the machine was an incredibly simple thing. It consisted of a single loop of hollow metal, twisted into a perfect arch like a gigantic croquet wicket. It was easy to see that the loop was hollow, for it was riddled with holes, and an eerie radiance was spilling out of it.
"You've got to help me hide it," Orban pleaded. "If I don't get Dr. Bryce out of the blue, bowmen will kill him!"
Wayne turned and gripped the lad's shoulder. "You said you were hungry. Perhaps we can do something about that."
"I am hungry," the lad admitted. "But there's food in the blue world."
Wayne thought that over for a minute, then found himself propelling his guest toward the kitchen.
He left him devouring a glass of milk. No, you didn't devour milk. But the Orban boy was dipping crackers in the milk and eating the crackers. It amounted to the same thing.
Wayne felt that he needed the support of cold print. Actual confirmation of the Orban story in black type. He found the clipping by turning out all the drawers of his desk and then looking under the blotter. It was crumpled and stained, as though someone had wept bitter tears over it. It read:
THE ORBAN STORY
By Ruth Stevens
An infant rocked from birth in a cradle two hundred feet long! A little boy lost in a high-test rocketship, seesawing through space! Around and around he whirled, obeying instructions from the age of eight, eating just enough to keep the spark of life from going out.
No disease germs bothered him out there in space! There were no measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, just instructions in his head and—a long forgetting!
What did he think about all those years? What did he dream about?
Phillip Orban was born on that ship. His father invented the Orban drive and built the first rocketship with an outer hull of sufficient hardness to withstand the stresses of a billion-mile journey through space.
But the power drive gave out, and the ship never completed its journey. It went into a circular orbit in the Asteroid Belt, and for seventeen years it drifted through space.
The boy's mother died when he was three, mercifully from a heart attack. The boy's father kept a log. We know that he climbed out on the naked hull when the boy was eight, to tighten a loosened gravity plate. A minor repair job—but he put off coming back. Put it off forever!
The boy remembered to remember. Food concentrates should be taken sparingly, twice a day. "You're seven now, son! No—eight tomorrow! Old enough to look after yourself!"
He hadn't one bittersweet, earthy moment to cling to. He'd never played pranks on other kids, or dressed up on Halloween, or gone fishing in a creek. He'd never watched the dawn redden a haystack or the moon silver the sea.
There were books on that ship. An odd assortment of books. The Old English Nursery Rhymes, Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll. And "How to Build It" books. How to build it if you were Michael Faraday or Edison or Steinmetz or Mullson. But Phillip Orban read every book on that ship. The psychologists who are in charge of him now won't tell us why they're so excited about his marginal notes.
They found the ship and Orban at last, sank magnetic grappling irons in the hull, and towed it back to earth. They returned Orban to his home in North Dakota, the family home, within a dozen yards of his father's dust-choked workshop.
A boy of seventeen, watched night and day by three trained psychologists. A robust boy, physically almost a man, would have to be terribly warped not to resent that! They're studying him like a guinea pig in a cage. And here's one unladylike journalist who raises her voice in protest! If the Orban boy—
Wayne shuddered, folded the clipping, and crammed it in his vest pocket.
Kenneth Wayne began remembering things: about a machine in an open field spilling an eerie radiance! And Dr. Bryce struggling with the Orban boy in front of the machine and plunging backward into the light. What shocking, incredible event had taken the famed psychologist from the sunlight before he could regain his balance?
Wayne also remembered that the Orban boy had fled, taking the machine with him! A hue and cry had been raised in the nation's press. A shrill screaming, journalism raised to high C. Had Orban deliberately pushed Dr. Bryce into the machin
e?
If an individual were the sum total of his experiences from birth, would not the whole outlook of Orban depart from the human norm? It was a terrifying thought! Was Orban a malicious monster with an inhuman capacity for deceit? Was he—
Twang!
Wayne wheeled with a gasp of horror.
A barbed and deadly looking arrow was quivering in the wall directly opposite the machine! It was an arrow two feet in length—fitted with metallic feathers to give it steadiness of flight and tipped with a point of jeweled brightness, visible through the translucent plastic of the wall.
Stark terror twisted Wayne's features into a glazed, unnatural mask. That the arrow had come out of the machine he could not doubt. It was directly in line with the "croquet wicket," and there was a spattering of blood on the still-quivering shaft.
There was blood on the wall too! Yet Wayne was quite sure that the arrow hadn't grazed his flesh. Automatically he raised one hand to his cheek and then stared at his palm. His hand gleamed whitely in the cold light. That dripping redness had come out of the machine along with the arrow! The arrow had missed him completely.
Whom had it wounded?
Wayne was swaying in sick horror when a knock sounded on the door and a familiar voice said:
"Ken! For heaven's sake, why did you lock the door?"
Wayne turned, unlocked the door, and threw it open, his face white.
The girl who came into the room was vividly alive. Coppery hair she had, cut in a bang, and her lips were slightly parted, her cheeks flushed. She was plainly out of breath and a little angry to be barred by a locked door after climbing two flights of stairs.
Ruth Stevens did not look like a newspaperwoman. She was striking in a challenging, vibrant way—the kind of girl who could change a man's center of gravity with a look, a quick smile.
She wasn't smiling now. Her eyes darted to the machine and then to the arrow.
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 2 Page 57
