The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - August 1980

by Various

  I pointed at the screen with one hand while wrapping the other around her waist. "The answer," I managed to get out. "Day after tomorrow, the whole crew will pack up and go home."

  She stared at the TV. She saw the main view and gasped. "Look at..." she exclaimed. "How can they...?"

  "The shadow, the shadow," I said.

  She studied the screen. Finally, she said, "Ah," and grinned. I let go of her to scan the view. I found the broken door through which they would enter. I found the Landrover, parked under a tree down the road, and there I found another useful shadow.

  We left the townhall a few minutes later. On the way home, we stopped at Howie's. I told him what I was planning. He replied with a laugh and said, "I'll be by 'bout eight. You'll need help cleaning up."

  Once home, I left Bonny to get supper together while I raided the garage for cedar shingles and shingle nails. I hammered the nails through the shingles till they looked like so many wool carders, and then I took them and a spade down the road. I found the spot where the Landrover would park.

  I laid the shingles on the ground, nails up. I shoveled a little gravel over them so they wouldn't show. And then I went back to the house for supper.

  After we'd done the dishes, I cached a wire cutter behind the couch cushion. I hunted up my old .22 target pistol, loaded it, and put it with the cutter. I carefully waxed the front hall floor, laid a braided throw rug in place, and strung a piece of stout monofilament fishing line across the doorway between the hall and the living room. Then I fetched in a cinder block and set it beside the bedroom door. At the last minute, I would set the door ajar and balance the block atop it.

  I showed Bonny what I'd done, saying, "Just watch your step if you have to use the hall." She nodded and laughed briefly, making a noise that was more of a snort than anything else. Her mouth was a tight line. She was, I think, remembering what she'd seen Fats doing to her.

  I wanted to cheer her up, but I didn't succeed till after we'd had a drink and gone to bed. She'd found out a while back that I've always been partial to redheads. She left her head alone, but she did tint one patch of hair. We both like the effect.

  In the morning, when we got to the office, we found signs that someone had been through the place. We knew what they'd been searching for, and we knew they must have been feeling frustrated. After all, they hadn't had much success so far. But they hadn't made a mess. Nothing was broken or missing or strewn on the floor, though everything was just a bit awry.

  They hadn't found what they wanted. The TV was still on the shelf, the amplifier beside it. I hooked everything up and scanned the town as carefully as I could. It didn't take long to spot Conant's Lotus parked on Church Street, in the driveway of a large old house that had been converted to apartments a few years ago. The house was kept up well, and it still looked like a sea captain's home, though its new status was betrayed by the parking area that had usurped a sizable chunk of the captain's lawn.

  I found the Landrover in the garage, which had once been a stable. That was enough to send me scanning through the house, checking apartments until I found our future assailants. Both wore a good coat of bandage. Fats had a cast covering most of his left leg, and his ribs were taped. Shorty's skull was wrapped in gauze, one arm was in a sling, and one bare foot was supported on a hassock. Conant was daubing what looked like iodine on the sole while Shorty winced repeatedly. A roll of bandage sat on the floor beside the hassock.

  I called Bonny in from her desk and let her look. She did, too, and with a grin. "Serves 'em right," she said.

  "Think we ought to have a word with Thanhauser?"

  She looked puzzled.

  "I think he's got the emergency room tomorrow night. It'd be a pity if he did too good a job on them."

  She brightened. "I'll call him this afternoon." But though we'd made the decision, the picture on the screen didn't change. It hadn't changed the day before either, but then I hadn't quite decided what to do. But now we had, and Fats didn't suddenly start trying to ease his cast. The tape on his ribs didn't suddenly seem too tight. Shorty's sling didn't grow too short or too long. I guessed Dave wouldn't compromise his ethics even in a good cause. Deserve as they might to suffer, he still felt obligated to do the best he could for them. I shrugged and told Bonny, "Don't bother."

  Nothing else happened the rest of that day, that night, or the next day, at least till we got home the next night. I got the agenda taken care of, talked the company into boosting my fuel-oil allocation, and disposed of a dozen lesser matters. It was wonderful how my concentration improved once I didn't have the Conant problem to worry about.

  When the time came, we went home as usual. We ate supper, I set the cinder block in place, and we sat down at the kitchen table with our second cups of coffee. We knew how things had to turn out, but we were still nervous. Howie's gadget didn't show more than probabilities, after all, and even if everything came out all right, we still had to go through the preliminaries. They wouldn't be pleasant.

  They weren't. The kitchen door crashed off its hinges right on schedule. Fats and Shorty charged in waving guns, hustled us into the living room, wired us up, hands behind us, and tossed us onto the couch. Then they began the interrogation, starting with Bonny. I supposed they wanted to have the fun part first. Then again, maybe they thought I'd break when I saw what Bonny was going through. But I was never further from breaking. The torn clothes, the indignities, the pain, they only made me frantic to get my hands loose and start my program.

  They didn't even look at me, and they never noticed my gropings behind the cushion as I found the cutter, right where it was supposed to be, cut the wire at the cost of only a little skin, and then found the pistol. They didn't notice a thing until I plugged Shorty right through the biceps of his outstretched arm, and then it was too late.

  "Freeze!" I said. If they heard, they didn't show it. Shorty rolled one way, Fats the other. I banged shots in their directions. That kept them from stopping long enough to draw their own guns. Shorty threw himself at the bedroom door, executing a perfect backwards somersault that left his head in position for the cinder block. It smashed his chin into the floor and left him out cold. Fats found his feet and ran for the front hall. He tripped over the fishline, landed on the rug, and cartwheeled into the wall with an audible crack of bone. He was out too.

  Bonny was laughing, but there were tears in her eyes as well. Hysterics. I told myself that was no surprise as I cut her loose. Things had happened awfully fast. We'd gone from down to up in thirty seconds, and even though we'd known what would happen, it had to have an effect.

  I let her go on while I collected the bad guys' guns and raided their wallets for their papers and cash. There was quite a lot of the latter. I guessed it was their pay for the job. I figured we had a better right to it, and, besides, it didn't seem a bad idea to add insult to injury.

  By then, Bonny had calmed herself down. I tossed my take on the couch beside her and said, "We can replace that dress."

  She grimaced—that didn't matter—and said, "What are you going to do with them now?"

  "Nothing. Throw 'em out." I shrugged. "What else?"

  "I wish I had a sharp knife."

  "That'd be gelding the lily, wouldn't it?"

  "Try me." She stretched her arms and stood up. She walked over to Shorty and kicked him in the ribs, none too gently. He opened his eyes and glared up at her. "So throw 'em out. I'll get a mop. For the blood."

  I did what she said. I grabbed Shorty by the collar and hauled him past his buddy, out the front door, and onto the lawn. I slapped Fats in the face until he came around, and then I hauled him out too. They struggled to their feet, Fats' broken leg dragging, and I told them, "Tell your boss from me that we were lucky. Maybe he'll believe me now."

  And that was it. As soon as they were out of sight, I went back inside; Bonny and I had a brief spell of the shakes—what if the probabilities hadn't worked out?—and Howie showed up with the shingles, a toothy grin
, and the laconic report: "Three flats. And the little one stepped on a shingle." Bonny changed, and we cleaned up the blood and bits of wire and crumbs of cinder block, and put the fishline back where it belonged. Then I poured the booze and we all sat down.

  Howie wanted to take his antenna apart and forget it had ever existed. I agreed. "If we keep it," I said, "it's only a matter of time before someone else gets wind of it. We might not be so lucky next time."

  "Could do a lotta good, though," said Howie as he topped off his glass.

  "I don't know," said Bonny. "You got it out of the house awfully quick."

  Howie shrugged. I said, "That was Emma."

  Bonny looked at me across the table. I wasn't sure just what her expression meant. "Well," she said. "I sure don't want it around this house once we're married."

  "Ayuh." I was suddenly uncomfortable. "It wouldn't do much for trust, would it?"

  "I know one thing. It would take all the surprise out of Christmas."

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  The alien walked into the Times Square fascination parlor and it said, "We regard you as a form of wildlife...."

  Fascination

  BY

  BILL PRONZINI and BARRY N. MALZBERG

  After a time, a necessary break in the action having come medias res while monies are collected for the next game and new shills drift in while old shills go away, after a while, as I am stating, I turn to the little guy standing to my left in the place and say, "Actually, fascination is not a metaphor for the real world. Fascination is a metaphor for nothing. There is no point in concerning ourselves with the placement of imaginary balls into imaginary holes aligned when we should be considering the more real and terrible problem of our time which, of course, is that of alien abduction."

  The little guy gives me a pained shrug. "I would appreciate your allowing me to concentrate on my game," he said, "as I am three dollars down in twenty minutes but just now beginning to evolve the proper geometries. I cannot engage in questions of metaphor."

  "I am doing nothing to oppose your concentration," I say. "It is a break in the activities. The aliens are moving amongst us and selectively taking some of us away to their home base in the Pleiades for nefarious purposes of research. First they cloud the minds of their victims and then they remove them. It is very sinister, this alteration of their perception, since it makes their protests, during abduction, not credible."

  The little guy said, "I don't understand pleads. I understand only this game and I wish for you to leave me alone."

  The bell for the next game rings at this point and I pass into a long, concentrated funnel of attention in which I attempt to line up five lights on the register by placing the ball in various pockets under the glass pane. The flight of the ball, however, is induced by total randomization and hitting five in a row, even with calculated backspin is a matter of the sheerest luck. Nevertheless turning one's attention to the game removes at least temporarily the torment of alien abduction, which is the primary purpose for my engaging in the sport to begin with. After a while the bell rings and my lights drop and the man far at the back says that number thirty-eight has won again, two special coupons. I sigh and place a dollar bill on the counter. "It is all fixed," I say. "It is total randomization and hence won only by shills."

  "It is a game of skill," the little guy says, "and it can be beaten. In my youth I beat it consistently but that is of course some time ago. Now I am trying to get back my arm."

  "Listen here," I say as the boy with the apron comes down the line and gives me three quarters in exchange for my dollar bill, "how do I know that you are a small man? To me you look about five foot four in approximate stature with beaten eyes and a haunted expression around a rather withered mouth, but this may be the aliens clouding my own mind in preparation for my removal to the Pleiades Cluster. Actually you could be six foot six and very powerful and this might not even be a fascination parlor."

  "What might it be?"

  "Well," I say after the slightest of pauses, "it might be the Oval Office of the White House for instance."

  "And what are you?"

  I give him a wink and a wave of the palm. Despite my loquacity I have a core of inner control. "That is for you to speculate."

  "I would rather not speculate," the little guy says. "I would rather concentrate on this next round fast upcoming. Getting five balls in a straight line either on the horizontal, diagonal or vertical is certainly difficult enough without conversations about the pleads."

  "Pleaides," I say.

  "Or the Oval office."

  "I am merely filling the time between games," I say. "I do not wish to make transaction upon the private spaces of your heart." On occasion I am capable of a certain elegance of speech, it will be noted, although that elegance cannot conceal the sadness within me, a sadness which has led me to such difficult dialogues with strangers. "Consider the implications," I say reasonably.

  "I cannot consider," the little guy says, looking past me anxiously. "I don't even know you."

  "Perhaps you do and you won't admit to it."

  "Jesus," he says in a nonblasphemous manner. By this time the game has already commenced; I have been so absorbed in our mutual conversation as to have not heard the bell, but whirring and clanging sounds which are those of the game in progress (although they might be the noise of descending alien spaceships) bring me back to attention along with my companion. "Two whole pitches," he mumbles and rolls his ball frantically. "I lost two rounds thanks to you."

  "Many people occupy the Oval Office from time to time," I say, rolling the ball in a desultory fashion. "I could be a high advisor or a member of one of the houses of Congress, co-equal partners in a bicameral legislature. Then again I could be a foreign dignity." I roll the ball grandly and note that I now have three in a row. "There are no easy answers," I say. "The aliens appearing among us and abducting some of our best and brightest have led me to a permanent distrust of the concept of an orderly universe."

  The little guy, sullenly enough, says nothing. I ignore him temporarily and try to get my fourth in a row, but the ball bounces under the glass and rolls without pocketing for a long time. Very frustrating. The bell rings and this time it is number twenty-nine who has won. Since I am sixteen, on the opposite side, I can neither see nor find any interest in number twenty-nine. The little guy wrings his hands. "It is all your fault for distracting me," he says. "It could have been entirely different."

  "It could yet be," a woman on my right says, taking her seat. She is a new customer, approximately five feet nine with large secondary sexual organs (I tend to think in a somewhat mechanically detached way) and red hair. "The aliens are wonderful. They are going to change our lives and save our planet from ecological doom."

  I smile at her and say, "I am glad to hear you discussing the aliens seriously even though I cannot agree with your point. The aliens are not here to help but merely to study us. After they have had their way, they will probably desert us for another thousand years, although then again they may come in and occupy. It is all very uncertain."

  "Of course it is uncertain," she says, taking a quarter out of her enormous handbag, "but that is life itself. Life is uncertain, not to say unfair. We can at least see them as a hopeful symbol, an ambiguous tool of change."

  "All right," the little guy says, "I think I have had quite enough and I will remove myself to a q
uieter section."

  "Not so soon," I say, placing a soothing hand on his wrist. "We've got to come to some kind of understanding now at once."

  "Understanding of what?"

  "Of the problem," I say.

  "I do not know what problem you are talking about."

  "Of course you do," the redhead says, looming in. "There is only one problem." She pauses. "The aliens," she says.

  The man with the microphone says that there will be a slight delay before the next game, which I find convenient since we are now at that point in conversation where utter concentration must apply. We are moving close to the center. "She is right, of course," I say. "You can't go on ignoring this. You have to face the truth."

  "What truth?"

  'The aliens," I say.

  "There are no aliens."

  "There may not be," I say. "I might even stipulate that. But, at last count, four thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven people in greater New York alone have claimed to have had either visual or vocal contact with alien beings, and seven hundred and sixteen souls have been absent without explanation for periods upwards of forty-eight hours. And furthermore when I narrow my eyes and concentrate, you appear six feet six to me and quite young and strong."

  The little guy gets to his feet. "This is ridiculous," he says. "You need help. Your mind is not right."

  "That may be true," I say gently. "The ability of the aliens to cloud minds prior to abduction has been well-established, and that is an absolute fact."

  "That is true," the redhead says. "That is a stipulated fact. This is not opinion we are discussing but actual actualities."

  The guy at the microphone says that the delay will continue as the machinery has temporarily shortcircuited. This has no significance other than to indicate that a non-shill has won the last game, an edge which cannot be permitted again, and the mechanics are hard at work. It is another form of the small corruption which infests Times Square, but in a world of larger corruption I find these little, more visible, swindles relaxing.