The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “‘Come on’ where?”

  “To the scene of the crime. If I don’t get this straightened out I’ll never sleep again.”

  THE ACME BUILDING WAS JUST where they had left it. The Bootery was where it belonged, likewise Chez Louis, and the newsstand. He stood where she had stood and agreed that she could not have been mistaken in her identification unless blind drunk. But he was equally positive as to what he had done.

  “You didn’t pick up a snifter or two on the way, did you?” he suggested hopefully.

  “Certainly not.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I do, too! We’re all finished with Hoag, aren’t we? You’ve traced him down and that’s that.”

  “Yes…why?”

  “Take me up to where he works. I want to ask his daytime personality whether or not he spoke to you getting off the bus.”

  He shrugged. “O.K., kid. It’s your party.”

  They went inside and entered the first free elevator. The starter clicked his castanets, the operator slammed his doors and said, “Floors, please.”

  Six, three, and nine. Randall waited until those had been served before announcing, “Thirteen.”

  The operator looked around. “I can give you twelve and fourteen, buddy, and you can split ’em.”

  “Huh?”

  “There ain’t no thirteenth floor. If there was, nobody would rent on it.”

  “You must be mistaken. I was on it this morning.”

  The operator gave him a look of marked restraint. “See for yourself.” He shot the car upward and halted it. “Twelve.” He raised the car slowly, the figure 12 slid out of sight and was quickly replaced by another. “Fourteen. Which way will you have it?”

  “I’m sorry,” Randall admitted. “I’ve made a silly mistake. I really was in here this morning and I thought I had noted the floor.”

  “Might ha’ been eighteen,” suggested the operator. “Sometimes an eight will look like a three. Who you lookin’ for?”

  “Detheridge & Co. They’re manufacturing jewelers.”

  The operator shook his head. “Not in this building. No jewelers, and no Detheridge.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Instead of answering, the operator dropped his car back to the tenth floor. “Try 1001. It’s the office of the building.”

  No, they had no Detheridge. No, no jewelers, manufacturing or otherwise. Could it be the Apex Building the gentleman wanted, rather than the Acme? Randall thanked them and left, considerably shaken.

  CYNTHIA HAD MAINTAINED COMPLETE SILENCE during the proceedings. Now she said, “Darling—”

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  “We could go up to the top floor, and work down.”

  “Why bother? If they were here, the building office would know about it.”

  “So they would, but they might not be telling. There is something fishy about this whole business. Come to think about it, you could hide a whole floor of an office building by making its door look like a blank wall.”

  “No, that’s silly. I’m just losing my mind, that’s all. You better take me to a doctor.”

  “It’s not silly and you’re not losing your grip. How do you count height in an elevator? By floors. If you didn’t see a floor, you would never realize an extra one was tucked in. We may be on the trail of something big.” She did not really believe her own arguments, but she knew that he needed something to do.

  He started to agree, then checked himself. “How about the stairways? You’re bound to notice a floor from a staircase.”

  “Maybe there is some hanky-panky with the staircases, too. If so, we’ll be looking for it. Come on.”

  But there was not. There was exactly the same number of steps—eighteen—between floors twelve and fourteen as there were between any other pair of adjacent floors. They worked down from the top floor and examined the lettering on each frosted-glass door. This took them rather long, as Cynthia would not listen to Randall’s suggestion that they split up and take half a floor apiece. She wanted him in her sight.

  No thirteenth floor and nowhere a door which announced the tenancy of a firm of manufacturing jewelers, neither Detheridge & Co. nor any other name. There was not time to do more than read the firm names on the doors; to have entered each office, on one pretext or another, would have taken much more than a day.

  Randall stared thoughtfully at a door labeled: “Pride, Greenway, Hamilton, Steinbolt, Carter & Greenway, Attorneys at Law.” “By this time,” he mused, “they could have changed the lettering on the door.”

  “Not on that one,” she pointed out. “Anyhow, if it was a set-up, they could have cleaned out the whole joint, too. Changed it so you wouldn’t recognize it.” Nevertheless she stared at the innocent-seeming letters thoughtfully. An office building was a terribly remote and secret place. Soundproof walls, Venetian blinds—and a meaningless firm name. Anything could go on in such a place—anything. Nobody would know. Nobody would care. No one would ever notice. No policeman on his beat, neighbors as remote as the moon, not even scrub service if the tenant did not wish it. As long as the rent was paid on time, the management would leave a tenant alone. Any crime you fancied and park the bodies in the closet.

  She shivered. “Come on, Teddy. Let’s hurry.”

  They covered the remaining floors as quickly as possible and came out at last in the lobby. Cynthia felt warmed by the sight of faces and sunlight, even though they had not found the missing firm. Randall stopped on the steps and looked around. “Do you suppose we could have been in a different building?” he said doubtfully.

  “Not a chance. See that cigar stand? I practically lived there. I know every flyspeck on the counter.”

  “Then what’s the answer?”

  “Lunch is the answer. Come on.”

  “O.K. But I’m going to drink mine.”

  She managed to persuade him to encompass a plate of corned-beef hash after the third whiskey sour. That and two cups of coffee left him entirely sober, but unhappy. “Cyn—”

  “Yes, Teddy.”

  “What happened to me?”

  She answered slowly. “I think you were made the victim of an amazing piece of hypnosis.”

  “So do I—now. Either that, or I’ve finally cracked up. So call it hypnosis. I want to know why.”

  She made doodles with her fork. “I’m not sure that I want to know. You know what I would like to do, Teddy?”

  “What?”

  “I would like to send Mr. Hoag’s five hundred dollars back to him with a message that we can’t help him, so we are returning his money.”

  He stared at her. “Send the money back? Good heavens!”

  Her face looked as if she had been caught making an indecent suggestion, but she went on stubbornly. “I know. Just the same, that’s what I would like to do. We can make enough on divorce cases and skip-tracing to eat on. We don’t have to monkey with a thing like this.”

  “You talk like five hundred was something you’d use to tip a waiter.”

  “No, I don’t. I just don’t think it’s enough to risk your neck—or your sanity—for. Look, Teddy, somebody is trying to get us in the nine hole; before we go any further, I want to know why.”

  “And I want to know why, too. Which is why I’m not willing to drop the matter. Damn it, I don’t like having shenanigans put over on me.”

  “What are you going to tell Mr. Hoag?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, which did not matter as it was already mussed. “I don’t know. Suppose you talk to him. Give him a stall.”

  “That’s a fine idea. That’s a swell idea. I’ll tell him you’ve broken your leg but you’ll be all right tomorrow.”

  “Don’t be like that, Cyn. You know you can handle him.”

  “All right. But you’ve got to promise me this, Teddy.”

  “Promise what?”

  “As long as we’re on this case we do everything together.”

  “D
on’t we always?”

  “I mean really together. I don’t want you out of my sight any of the time.”

  “But see here, Cyn, that may not be practical.”

  “Promise.”

  “O.K., O.K. I promise.”

  “That’s better.” She relaxed and looked almost happy. “Hadn’t we better get back to the office?”

  “The hell with it. Let’s go out and take in a triple feature.”

  “O.K., Brain.” She gathered up her gloves and purse.

  THE MOVIES FAILED TO AMUSE him, although they had selected an all-Western bill, a fare of which he was inordinately fond. But the hero seemed as villainous as the foreman, and the mysterious masked riders, for once, appeared really sinister. And he kept seeing the thirteenth floor of the Acme Building, the long glass partition behind which the craftsmen labored, and the little dried-up manager of Detheridge & Co. Damn it—could a man be hypnotized into believing that he had seen anything as detailed as that?

  Cynthia hardly noticed the pictures. She was preoccupied with the people around them. She found herself studying their faces guardedly whenever the lights went up. If they looked like this when they were amusing themselves, what were they like when they were unhappy? With rare exceptions the faces looked, at the best, stolidly uncomplaining. Discontent, the grim marks of physical pain, lonely unhappiness, frustration, and stupid meanness she found in numbers, but rarely a merry face. Even Teddy, whose habitual debonair gaiety was one of his chief virtues, was looking dour—with reason, she conceded. She wondered what were the reasons for those other unhappy masks.

  She recalled once having seen a painting entitled “Subway.” It showed a crowd pouring out the door of an underground train while another crowd attempted to force its way in. Getting on or getting off, they were plainly in a hurry, yet it seemed to give them no pleasure. The picture had no beauty in itself; it was plain that the artist’s single purpose had been to make a bitter criticism of a way of living.

  She was glad when the show was over and they could escape to the comparative freedom of the street. Randall flagged a taxi and they started home.

  “Teddy—”

  “Uh?”

  “Did you notice the faces of the people in the theater?”

  “No, not especially. Why?”

  “Not a one of them looked as if they got any fun out of life.”

  “Maybe they don’t.”

  “But why don’t they? Look—we have fun, don’t we?”

  “You bet.”

  “We always have fun. Even when we were broke and trying to get the business started we had fun. We went to bed smiling and got up happy. We still do. What’s the answer?”

  He smiled for the first time since the search for the thirteenth floor and pinched her. “It’s fun living with you, kid.”

  “Thanks. And right back at you. You know, when I was a little girl, I had a funny idea.”

  “Spill it.”

  “I was happy myself, but as I grew up I could see that my mother wasn’t. And my father wasn’t. My teachers weren’t—most of the adults around me weren’t happy. I got an idea in my head that when you grew up you found out something that kept you from ever being happy again. You know how a kid is treated: ‘You’re not old enough to understand, dear,’ and ‘Wait till you grow up, darling, and then you’ll understand.’ I used to wonder what the secret was they were keeping from me and I’d listen behind doors to try and see if I couldn’t find out.”

  “Born to be a detective!”

  “Slush. But I could see that, whatever it was, it didn’t make the grown-ups happy; it made ’em sad. Then I used to pray never to find out.” She gave a little shrug. “I guess I never did.”

  He chuckled. “Me neither. A professional Peter Pan, that’s me. Just as happy as if I had good sense.”

  She placed a small gloved hand on his arm. “Don’t laugh, Teddy. That’s what scares me about this Hoag case. I’m afraid that if we go ahead with it we really will find out what it is the grown-ups know. And then we’ll never laugh again.”

  He started to laugh, then looked at her hard. “Why, you’re really serious, aren’t you?” He chucked her under the chin. “Be your age, kid. What you need is dinner—and a drink.”

  IV

  After dinner, Cynthia was just composing in her mind what she would say to Mr. Hoag on telephoning him when the house buzzer rang. She went to the entrance of their apartment and took up the house phone. “Yes?”

  Almost immediately she turned to her husband and voicelessly shaped the words, “It’s Mr. Hoag.” He raised his brows, put a cautioning finger to his lips, and with an exaggerated tiptoe started for the bedroom. She nodded.

  “Just a moment, please. There—that’s better. We seem to have had a bad connection. Now who is it, please?”

  “Oh…Mr. Hoag. Come up, Mr. Hoag.” She punched the button controlling the electrical outer lock.

  He came in bobbing nervously. “I trust this is not an intrusion, but I have been so upset that I felt I couldn’t wait for a report.”

  She did not invite him to sit down. “I am sorry,” she said sweetly, “to have to disappoint you. Mr. Randall has not yet come home.”

  “Oh.” He seemed pathetically disappointed, so much so that she felt a sudden sympathy. Then she remembered what her husband had been put through that morning and froze up again.

  “Do you know,” he continued, “when he will be home?”

  “That I couldn’t say. Wives of detectives, Mr. Hoag, learn not to wait up.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Well, I presume I should not impose on you further. But I am anxious to speak with him.”

  “I’ll tell him so. Was there anything in particular you had to say to him? Some new data, perhaps?”

  “No—” he said slowly. “No, I suppose…it all seems so silly!”

  “What does, Mr. Hoag?”

  He searched her face. “I wonder—Mrs. Randall, do you believe in possession?”

  “Possession?”

  “Possession of human souls—by devils.”

  “I can’t say that I’ve thought much about it,” she answered cautiously. She wondered if Teddy were listening, if he could reach her quickly if she screamed.

  Hoag was fumbling strangely at his shirt front; he got a button opened; she whiffed an acrid, unclean smell, then he was holding out something in his hand, something fastened by a string around his neck under his shirt.

  She forced herself to look at it and with intense relief recognized it for what it was—a cluster of fresh cloves of garlic, worn as a necklace. “Why do you wear it?” she asked.

  “It does seem silly, doesn’t it?” he admitted. “Giving way to superstition like that—but it comforts me. I’ve had the most frightening feeling of being watched—”

  “Naturally. We’ve been—Mr. Randall has been watching you, by your instructions.”

  “Not that. A man in a mirror—” He hesitated.

  “A man in a mirror?”

  “Your reflection in a mirror watches you, but you expect it; it doesn’t worry you. This is something new, as if someone were trying to get at me, waiting for a chance. Do you think I’m crazy?” he concluded suddenly.

  Her attention was only half on his words, for she had noticed something when he held out the garlic which had held her attention. His fingertips were ridged and grooved in whorls and loops and arches like anyone else’s—and they were certainly not coated with collodion tonight. She decided to get a set of prints for Teddy. “No, I don’t think you’re crazy,” she said soothingly, “but I think you’ve let yourself worry too much. You should relax. Wouldn’t you like a drink?”

  “I would be grateful for a glass of water.”

  WATER OR LIQUOR, IT WAS the glass she was interested in. She excused herself and went out to the kitchen where she selected a tall glass with smooth, undecorated sides. She polished it carefully, added ice and water with equal care not to wet the sides. She carried it in, h
olding it near the bottom.

  Intentionally or unintentionally, he had outmaneuvered her. He was standing in front of the mirror near the door, where he had evidently been straightening his tie and tidying himself after returning the garlic to its hide-away. When he turned around at her approach she saw that he had put his gloves back on.

  She invited him to sit down, thinking that if he did so he would remove his gloves. But he said, “I’ve imposed on you too long as it is.” He drank half the glass of water, thanked her, and left silently.

  Randall came in. “He’s gone?”

  She turned quickly. “Yes, he’s gone. Teddy, I wish you would do your own dirty work. He makes me nervous. I wanted to scream for you to come in.”

  “Steady, old girl.”

  “That’s all very well, but I wish we had never laid eyes on him.” She went to a window and opened it wide.

  “Too late for Herpicide. We’re in it now.” His eye rested on the glass. “Say—did you get his prints?”

  “No such luck. I think he read my mind.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Teddy, what do you intend to do about him now?”

  “I’ve got an idea, but let me work it out first. What was this song and dance he was giving you about devils and a man in a mirror watching him?”

  “That wasn’t what he said.”

  “Maybe I was the man in the mirror. I watched him in one this morning.”

  “Huh-uh. He was just using a metaphor. He’s got the jumps.” She turned suddenly, thinking that she had seen something move over her shoulder. But there was nothing there but the furniture and the wall. Probably just a reflection in the glass, she decided, and said nothing about it. “I’ve got ’em, too,” she added. “As for devils, he’s all the devil I want. You know what I’d like?”

  “What?”

  “A big, stiff drink and early to bed.”

  “Good idea.” He wandered out into the kitchen and started mixing the prescription. “Want a sandwich, too?”

  RANDALL FOUND HIMSELF STANDING IN his pajamas in the living room of their apartment, facing the mirror that hung near the outer door. His reflection—no, not his reflection, for the image was properly dressed in conservative clothes appropriate to a solid man of business—the image spoke to him.