by Algis Budrys
Things at Lapointe’s Garage settled into a routine very quickly.
Roland did teach me how to drive, by the simplest method, which was to sit me behind the wheel in the middle of a large open field, point out the accelerator, brake, and clutch and the functions of each, and then stand back and let me stall out a few times, swing around wildly a few times, damned near run into a tree a few times even if this meant wandering far afield, and fairly soon learn to coordinate everything. I did not, of course, tell him that I knew how to drive our ground cars. He, on the other hand, did not tell me that I was a good driver, which I very soon was.
The name of the town, if it can be called a town, was Phyllis. The name of the next town was Wertenbaker. The name of the town three miles down a side road, fronting a lake, was Serena Manor. At some early point in our relationship, Margery explained this to me. Daniel Wertenbaker had named Phyllis for his daughter, and Serena Manor for his wife. There was no particular reason for the towns in the first place; of the combined population of about three hundred, two hundred fifty were engaged in raising chickens, one of the few crops that would grow profitably on the soil. The narrow spaces in the woods that the three towns represented were crammed with two-and three-story chicken coops, housing well over a million chickens, and they smelled like it. At night you could hear the chickens snoring. During the day you could hear them eating, and pecking weaker chickens to death.
Margery came to see me every day after work, and I used up all of my muscle balm. By the time I did that, she was walking normally, and it would have taken a very sharp eye to detect the difference between her legs; in effect, there was none.
She had to account for it somehow. At first, it had been a sort of miracle, but one that could fail. The leg could go back to what it had been. The whole thing might have been some kind of illusion born of hope. But now it wasn’t failing, and if she didn’t find some way to account for it, there were too many questions to ask about me. And she saw me every day, and I worked in a garage. What could be mysterious about me?
‘It’s the Sister Kenny treatment, isn’t it?’ she said, referring to a long, hard course of hot towels and massage that only worked sometimes, and only if it was started the minute the paralysis set in. ‘Some variation on the Sister Kenny treatment.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A variation on it,’ as if I really knew what I was talking about. And she brightened up.
‘That explains it,’
‘Absolutely.’ As long as you didn’t question it. And what do you suppose the chances were of her ever questioning it once she had hit upon Sister Kenny in the first place? She flirted the leg back and forth, feeling the power and the weight-carrying capacity of it. If she spoke of it skeptically, ever, might not the charm be broken? She licked her lips and nodded.
‘Yes,’ she said very softly. The offer to bed her was still good, I knew. I wanted to, but somehow I felt that it was too soon, and that Lapointe would hear us, and that – in truth, I wanted to, very much, but the thought of interspecies … well, I would get to it, but it would take some getting used to – I was scared. I was scared green. I’d had one or two women, not many, and I was afraid of all the usual things, plus giving myself away. I had no idea what the sexual appendage of an Earth male looked like. Whereas Margery knew very well. It would take special circumstances, and they had not yet occurred. And so we each had a secret thing between us.
I know it puzzled Margery that I did not take her up on the offer. But she was too polite to come out and ask me directly. I also presumed that the creation of a good leg meant, among other things, a change in her sex life … more discrimination, certainly; perhaps even complete abstinence until she could fully assimilate the change, and fully assimilate the idea that she could be choosier than in the past.
I gradually learned Lapointe’s real business. Once or twice a month a tow truck dragging a car would pull up to the other building in the middle of the night, and once or twice a month a car would emerge from the building, a different color and usually with different accessories than when it went in at the end of a hook. The car would be driven away by Christie, Roland’s right-hand man, and the following day, late, Christie would come back on the bus.
Christie was about five feet three inches tall, and I presume the lack of height weighed on him; he was muscular, young, and handsome, but didn’t have a sense of humor at all. He kept to himself and handed Roland his tools.
In due course – it was the spring – Christie did not come back. Well, it was a weak point in Roland’s system; there was nothing to compel Christie to come back, if he chose instead to keep the car, or the money from the car, and go and do something else thereafter. There was really little likelihood Roland would spare the time and trouble to find him. And if he found him, the money would likely already be spent.
Roland went around in a black rage. Finally I said to him: ‘Roland.’
‘What?’
‘Roland, what if I were to deliver the cars?’
Roland gripped me by the upper arm in a hold that bruised flesh. ‘What the hell do you know about it?’
The hold was not comfortable. But I pretended not to mind it. ‘I’ve got eyes. I know Christie takes the cars somewhere. I know he didn’t come back. If the authorities had him, they would have been here by now. The other possibility is he’s in cahoots with whoever receives the cars, but that makes no sense because that man would cut off his source of supply if he offended you. So Christie did this on his own. All right – from now on, I’ll be Christie. The difference is, I’ll always come back.’
‘Will you?’ Roland frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Because Margery’s here,’ I said, and it was the truth. Somehow, without really meaning to, I had built up too many ties to cut.
Roland grinned mirthlessly. ‘Yes. Little Sis Margery. Little Margery that’s no longer crippled. I wonder how much I believe in Sister Kenny. I wonder, if it’s that easy, why don’t more people use it.’ His eyes were very sharp on my face for a minute. Then he shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said, and it was a moment before I realized he had okayed the deal. ‘All right,’ he said again. ‘You gonna stick with the Mullica name?’
‘It’s my name,’ I declared, because, after all, what else could I do?
‘Right,’ he said.
‘What difference does it make?’ I asked a little testily.
‘Gonna show up on your driver’s license, that’s why,’ he said, and walked away to use the phone.
And that is how I got a birth certificate, and then a Social Security card, and a driver’s license in the name of Jack Mullica: on the strength of one phone call from Roland Lapointe to someone who could forge the basic document.
To this day, nobody ever checks back to the original issuing authority for the validity of the birth certificate. If you present the purported certificate in another state, the odds are very low of the particular clerk’s even knowing what a genuine certificate should look like. For that matter, states themselves change the appearance of their birth certificates from time to time. I presume the appearance of my certificate is actually genuine for its time frame. I don’t actually know – no one has ever questioned it, and I have never seen another one.
I took it, when I got it, to the Social Security office in Mays Landing, and to the driver’s license station in Atlantic City, and in about as much time as it takes to tell, I was a valid citizen of the United States of America. Eventually I got a fake draft card, and that was a bit of a risk, but not as much of a risk as a physical examination would have been. I had to explain to Roland that I was a bit old to just take the exam in the regular way. He grumbled, but he saw the sense of it. In any event, no one has ever asked to see it. I marvel at such a country – I don’t complain.
– Reconstruction. A.B.
FOOTNOTE
A check of records bears out that Mullica obtained them as just outlined. The documents all either are forgeries or emanate from forgeries. The birth certifi
cate is in fact rather crude, containing inks not available at the time of the supposed birth, and being countersigned by the wrong names. But no one subjects the ink and paper to analyses, and who knows what the right names are?
The draft card is rather good. It would have to be, since it was required by law to be carried on the person, and was subject to inspection at any time. But Mullica was never asked for it, apparently. From time to time he would have to record the pertinent data on work applications and the like, but in that case the persons asking for the data did not ask to see the draft card. Nor, given the nature of the times, did anyone ever check the data; they simply filed it together with the rest of his employment data.
Until I began the research for this book, I had no idea how porous the systems of identification really are in this country. No wonder Americans are forever getting into trouble on visits overseas, where there are much stricter controls no child of Uncle Sam will tolerate well.
– A.B.
STATEMENT, DITLO RAVASHAN
The Navy truck let off Yankee at one end of National. Then it drove to the other end, and the driver helped me with the crate with Joro and the dry ice in it. There were no benches; I sat on the crate and watched the truck go around a turn and disappear from this account. It was a little chilly. The crate fumed Co2 gas through its narrow bottom slots. Once a man going by eyed the crate thoughtfully. ‘Lobsters,’ I said, and the man nodded and went on his way, without saying, ‘On dry ice?’
I watched the women. I had plans. Most of the women were dogs, but every once in a while a good-looking one went by, her physical attributes evident even in her topcoat. I pictured them at my feet, beside themselves, crying out like the animals they were, and this helped pass the time.
After about an hour, a plain station wagon came cruising down the ramp and stopped in front of me. Henshaw – he introduced himself – was driving it: an ugly, appealing black man, well dressed, in his early thirties, who did not waste my time with small talk. He looked me in the face, and when he shook my hand, he looked at my wrist. Something behind his eyes nodded to itself. But he didn’t say anything. He took his end of the crate, we wrestled it aboard, and were on our way.
We crossed the river and stopped at a motel. ‘You’ve got a reservation,’ Henshaw said. He told me the name. ‘It’s already paid for. All you have to do is get your key. Tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, we’ll have an apartment for you. And some clothes. Meanwhile, I strongly suggest you get some sleep. And order your food in from room service.’ He reached behind him and handed me a brown paper shopping bag. ‘Razor, toothbrush, and so forth.’ He looked at my jaw again. What he said was ‘Good luck,’ and he and Joro’s corpse drove away. I went into the motel, and commenced my life as an American.
I had been right, when I carefully misused the engines on my craft – it would be a very good life for me here. Much better than it would have been on my home world. I had seen the retired captains on my home world; they did not look happy. They looked as though they had lost something, out in the stars. As indeed they had; they had grown old, out among the stars, and had had to come home, finally, and gradually dry up, and blow away.
It was a long run on Earth for me, and I enjoyed it immensely. We got me an apartment in Georgetown, and I enjoyed its amenities. I did not go out of town and leave it very often; I did not need to, and I did not want to. Why take chances?
We also acquired a very nice house in Georgetown, quite nearby, and that is where the National Register of Pathological Anomalies settled in after we got government funding. I ran it with a phone at first, and then computers, and I never set foot in the NRPA offices. Why should I? The NRPA occasionally sent a message to its ‘parent organization,’ and I would answer it, and that was that – the NRPA was staffed by conscientious civil servants, and they ran the routine daily in an exemplary manner. They even did a lot of good for pathology departments across the nation; well worth the taxpayer’s dollar. And meanwhile I took in the recreational delights of Earth.
Not to put too fine a face on it, I had no qualms about using prostitutes, often black and in pairs, which I did with imagination and gusto. A permanent attachment seemed much too risky to me. It meant I would never have a wife, but that hardly mattered; I was not going to have children in any event, and I counted that, as a matter of fact, among my advantages. For one thing, I did not have to go through the stultifying mechanics of contraception.
Prostitutes are cheaper, and one does not have to entertain them with small talk. I met them in hotels all over town for years, and many a memorable time we had. It really is amazing what you can get the animals to do if you make the rewards big enough for them. And I had plenty of reward to distribute.
I proceeded to make Yankee very rich, you see, a procedure he took to very well. I began by having him manufacture shoes like mine, through a dummy corporation, and though there were imitators very soon, that was to be expected – and Yankee owned some of the imitators, too. Then there was the deceptively simple aerosol valve, which alone would have sufficed to make him a multimillionaire if he hadn’t had to split it with the front man. And the new way to make a milk carton, the razor that was a continuous strip of razor-sharp steel in a compact head, and so on.
Several things were to be remarked on about all this. For one thing, I got my split, of course, and not even I could spend it as fast as it came in. For another, Yankee, no matter how wealthy he became, did not lose his primary drive, which was not for power, which he soon had to a nearly incalculable point, and not so much for a public awareness of his actual power, which awareness wavered with his fortunes and was never very accurate. Rather, it was for public awareness that he commanded mysterious and fundamentally, deliberately unknowable power. That was more important to him than any other single thing on Earth, by far. It created a peculiar aura around him. Nobody liked him. Nobody loved him – and this bothered him. But everyone kowtowed to him, and that, it seems, was what he held most precious.
And for a third, it would take an inspection team from my home world about thirty seconds to determine that this was too much to be a coincidence; someone was feeding Earth this information. So there was some risk, but it was on the order of requiring Earth to be the subject of an inspection, and then it required the inspection team to find me. I thought I had made that rather difficult for them. But in any case you will notice that none of the information was strategic or tactical.
Well, actually, when I gave him the secret of the transistor, it was a close call. But in fact several laboratories on Earth were about to discover it for themselves, and all we did was jump the gun by, literally, months. And I did not so much give him the secret of the transistor – which I did not fully know – as alert him to the possibility. He was the one who found the work at Bell Labs and elsewhere much advanced. So that was all right. And of course the patents were quickly superseded, and improvements on the original design came thick and fast and were patented by others. But I’m sure you will agree that with a device as fundamental as the transistor, you can spill ninety-nine parts in a hundred, and still realize quite a nice profit. As we certainly did.
As I say, it was a generously nice run. For a time, Yankee restlessly wanted more information about my home civilization, and data such as the engineering behind the spaceship engine drive. But the fact is I couldn’t have given him the latter if I had wanted to – what would a pilot have to know about engineering, as distinguished from inconspicuous unbalanced use of the engines? – and the former, he quickly realized, could have been made up or couldn’t have been made up, and how was he to know? So our arrangement was not quite what he had expected, but it did make him filthy rich, and he quickly accommodated to it.
And he found ways to use it, nevertheless. I’m sure he told very selected people about me, and what I represented. What else accounts for his rise in American politics? Other people were easily on the same side as he on the Communist question, and other people were this,
that, and the other thing as he was, but only Yankee wove the web of obligations and fear, the ‘natural’ aristocracy of the person who came up through the ranks in a certain way, and only he presented his particular solutions to problems that frequently did not exist, although he said they did, and beat the drum for years until they were well entrenched. It was a lovely performance, and I frequently chuckled over it. Even the times he was defeated, temporarily, would have been a permanent setback for any lesser man, but he just soldiered on, and whispered whatever he whispered to his corporate sponsors, and lo! there he was again, as if he had never been gone.
And nobody, as far as I know, ever questioned the source of his wealth. Remarkable. Only in America.
And then one day, after about twenty years, things changed. I had come back from one of my various trips around the country, to inspect various odd bits that proved never to actually be flying saucer wreckage, and I noticed that I was more tired than usual, and that my arms tended to go to sleep. Then a while after that I began to get dizzy spells, and shortly thereafter the dizzy spells became quite noticeable; I could hardly stand up without feeling the effects. Lying down became an exercise in increasingly careful motion. And my legs cramped at night. At first I could solve this by slipping out of bed and standing up for a minute or two, but then the cramps moved out of my calves into my thighs and feet, and did not yield to simple remedies. I began to seriously lose sleep.
I did not know what to do. I could not, I at first told myself, go to a doctor. I became very worried when it proved more and more difficult to get up from a chair – often it took me two or three tries. I was only glad that no one observed me; I did fire the cleaning woman. I did, in short, as much as I could, and when this proved insufficient, I thought to call in Henshaw.
