by Algis Budrys
One thing I learned from the burlesque was that Earthwomen had essentially the same equipment I was more or less familiar with. And I finally got my hands on one of Roland’s nudist magazines, and found out my equipment was not essentially different from what Margery was accustomed to. But somehow … I don’t know. It just … well, it might have gone on forever, I suppose, but one time I came back from Newark at dawn and found the light on in the back garage.
It was dawn. Roland never got up at dawn; he worked mostly at night. So the chances of the light having gone on recently were very low. But it was just as unusual for Roland to work through the night. In fact, he had never done it.
I looked at the window for a long time. Then I cautiously opened the door, and first thing that struck me was the smell. It reminded me, in a way, of the spots in Nick Olchuck’s barn where the cats and the rats had been. But this was fresher. I went around the stuff piled in the front of the garage to look harmless through the window, and there was Roland, dead.
He was tough. The car had slipped off a jack and put a brake drum in the center of his chest. If the wheel had been on the drum, he might have lived. Even then, from the blood and the torn-up fingers it was clear he had been hours dying, his chest all concaved, but trying to push the car off to the end, dying, finally, in the small hours of the night, alone and thinking God knows what. I looked at him for a long time, and a lot went through my mind.
But really my choices were very few. I couldn’t keep the operation going, and I couldn’t expect to keep the garage … I couldn’t expect anything. And I realized it was my big chance.
I backed out of the garage and closed the door. Then I went over to Roland’s car, and the keys were in it, as they always were. I drove over to Margery’s, and threw pebbles at her window. When she finally opened the window, tousle-headed and with her breasts falling out of her nightgown, I said: ‘Let’s go.’
She blinked. ‘What?’
‘You coming with me?’
She blinked again. Her glance grew sharp. She took in Roland’s car, and the sealed envelope sticking out of my pocket, and she bit her lower lip, but she nodded. Twenty minutes later we were on our way, headed for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and I was explaining. It didn’t take much. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ve got it.’
‘One more thing.’
‘What’s that?’
I carefully did not look at her. ‘Will you marry me?’
She said nothing for quite a while. Then she began to laugh. ‘Sure. Why not? Somebody’s got to make an honest man out of you.’
‘I didn’t mean to make a joke,’ I said.
She bit her lip. ‘No, I don’t suppose you did.’ She looked at me in the morning sunlight while the car zipped along. ‘Neither did I, really.’ Her eyes were grave. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you. For richer or poorer. For better or for worse.’ Her mouth quirked up. ‘I’ll even throw in till death do us part; how about that, Jack, my Mullica Jack?’
I studied her. ‘I hope to make you happy.’
She shook her head, staring off at nothing. ‘I think you’ve already done as much about that as you could,’ she said. ‘It’s quite a bit, you know. Don’t try to do any more than you can.’
I didn’t say anything. We would see.
We were married in a little chapel in Sandusky, Ohio.
‘You may kiss the bride,’ the beaming JP and the beaming witness said, and I did. Then we moved to the Lake Vista Motel, and there the pattern of our life together was established forever. I looked at her bleakly in the morning light, and she looked back at me and shook her head slightly.
‘It doesn’t matter that much, Jack,’ she said.
‘Maybe it’ll be better as I get used to you.’
‘Maybe. The big point is, I’m warm, I’m comfortable, and I know you love me.’
I smiled a little. We were on the bed, stark naked, and she looked so desirable, so much the woman— Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t satisfied her, because I had. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t ejaculated, because I had. But it was also true that I had no idea how she felt to be inside of, which made me practically unique among the men she had known.
‘Jack—’
I let my grin widen. ‘What the hell? It wasn’t so bad.’
She laughed in turn. ‘No. No, it wasn’t.’ She wriggled on the bed. ‘In fact, if you felt like some more, I could use—’ Well, that’s as much of that as you need to know. Gradually, over time, we accommodated. The time also came when she stayed out a little late, and after that, for all the years we were together, there were times when she stayed out. But she always came back. It was all right. Really.
We settled down in Detroit. I got a job in a garage – just cleaning up, at first, but eventually I got to be the lead mechanic – and she got a series of jobs as a supermarket cashier and so forth. Nobody ever came for us. What happened to Nick Olchuck we never knew, but the assumption is he vanished into a bottle. Roland’s car we left on the street, miles away from the first apartment we got, and nobody ever connected us to it. I went by it a couple of times, and first the tires were gone, and then the hood and trunk were open, and then the engine was gone, and in about a week – this was before Detroit got real bad, which was why it took so long – all that was left was the frame and the body shell. So that was all right. And we lived.
We lived not badly. Both of us were making good money. I was making a bit on the side; Automotive News ran some of my fillers, and some of the other magazines. And then one day, in the classified section of the News, was an ad for an entry-level position in the public relations department of the number three carmaker. I was I guess a little bit older than most of the other applicants, but I had a track record established, and the man who would be my boss liked the way I wrote, and so I became an automotive PR man.
It was not glamorous. All the glamor is on the outside. It was cranking out press releases about the new rear axle ratio, and the rejetted carburetor, and like that, and you had to go to the engineers for the raw data. Engineers do not particularly like PR men. The senior PR men got to stand around test tracks in suits and ties without a spot on them; we grunts had to find someplace that would wash a car at six in the morning in some godforsaken hole on the day of a press conference. More than once, I’ve mopped off a boss’s car with the T-shirt torn from my own body, hosing down the piece with a hotel loading dock hose. And turned up at eight A.M. impeccably dressed, except I wasn’t wearing an undershirt, handing out press kits to contemptuous automotive journalists, and secretly wondering if the engineers had actually had time to get the units into halfway decent shape. I remember the time we sent off the automotive editor of a major magazine to drive back to Long Island and test the hot new brakes on a completely new model; after he was gone, it turned out the engineers hadn’t gotten delivery on the hot new brakes, so they substituted a set from the old model. We heard about that – we heard about that a great deal, and oddly enough it wasn’t the engineers’ fault, somehow; it was the PR department’s.
But everything that doesn’t outright kill you will eventually go away. One day they offered me the top job in the Chicago shop of the PR department, and I took it, because it was a good deal of money, and Margery and I moved to near the Borrow Street El stop in Shoreview. We lived in a nice condo overlooking the lake, and not even Selmon’s eventually turning up really spoiled it, though I will admit I began hitting the bottle a little harder. But even that wasn’t bad enough to really matter. I had made it – I was an American named Jack Mullica, I had a good job, a wife, Margery, and I was home free.
Even after Selmon died – God, I felt sorry for the poor dumb son of a bitch! – I was home free.
– Reconstructed. A.B.
THE END
It was August, and Jack Mullica was home, idly watching TV. He was on sick leave. At a press conference in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, at nine at night or thereabouts, he had been out on an airfield, checking the lineup of cars for the next m
orning’s exhibition. Somehow one of the cars had been left idling, and somehow it had dropped into gear. (The PR department of course denies that ever happens, so the incident was tightly suppressed.) At any rate, the car had brushed Jack while he was paying attention to something else, and he had a badly bruised shoulder and arm. He was wearing a home-style sling on the arm and was doped up on Margery’s Darvon now; that was all right – there wasn’t anything to that, although he didn’t much care for the close approach to getting something broken and being taken to a doctor. But he was convinced it had been a simple accident, and was not liable to be repeated.
Margery was out somewhere. Jack was watching President Richard Nixon getting into a helicopter in the middle of the day, and thrusting his arms out to each side with his fingers spread into a V. His family was around him. Jack frowned. Where was Nixon off to now, when he ought to be staying in Washington and putting down this Watergate scandal? Jack was about to bring more of his attention to the whole business – he thought the TV had made a reference to President Gerald Ford; what they must have meant was Vice President – when the doorbell rang.
Margery’s forgotten her keys or something, Mullica thought as he made his way to the front door. Came into the building on someone else’s ring, and now she’s standing outside, waiting for me to let her in. He opened the door, and there was Hanig Eikmo. He gaped at him, and Eikmo, who was bent a little oddly, and wearing a suit from K Mart or someplace like that, and needed a shave, said in a hasty voice: ‘Can I come in?’
‘Well – well, sure,’ Mullica said, and stepped back. He could not close his mouth. How in the hell had Eikmo – it was Eikmo, wasn’t it? – he peered at the man as he came in and pushed at the door behind him, Mullica giving ground – yes, of course it was Eikmo, and somewhere in his system Mullica realized the Darvon was affecting him more than he had thought.
‘Can I sit down?’ Eikmo was saying, and once again Mullica said ‘Why, sure,’ and Eikmo sat on a straight chair, ignoring the overstuffed sofa.
‘How are you, Dwuord?’ Eikmo said. ‘Things going well for you?’ And Mullica belatedly realized Eikmo was speaking in their old language.
He pushed the language forward, speaking it for only the second time in years. ‘I – how did you find me?’ Mullica was gathering himself, getting his presence back.
‘Well, Selmon was writing to me once a month – payments, sending back the money he owed me. In the course of that, he told me you were here. Crazy. Policy violations like the plague, around here. Why the hell didn’t he move away? But then the letters stopped coming.’ Eikmo looked around. ‘You alone? Nobody lives or visits here except for your lady?’
Mullica nodded. Eikmo looked around him again, and relaxed to a great extent. ‘Nice. I was settled in pretty well, too, but not like this. Wife died a little while ago. Not too much of a surprise; she was a lot older than me.’ Eikmo’s voice grew softer for a moment. ‘I liked her a lot. Came from someplace near where we originally crashed. Funny. Coincidence. But she left the barrens years before we got there. Well, anyway – I came out here looking for Selmon. Had to know what had happened to him. And I found out what happened. Finding you wasn’t that hard. I’ve been following you for about a week. When I saw your lady go out a while ago, I came up.’
‘Look, Eikmo, it’s nice to see you, but policy—’
Eikmo laughed. ‘Policy! You haven’t sold them the shoes and a dozen other things? The razor?’
‘Christ, I use an electric shaver. What are you talking about?’
Eikmo laughed. ‘Sure. You don’t know a thing about it.’
‘Oh, come on, Eikmo—’
Eikmo stood up. ‘It doesn’t really matter what you say, does it? I’ll take care of you. Living high on the hog. Killing Selmon.’ He slipped a long, sharp knife out of his sleeve. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Killing a poor harmless man like Selmon!’
‘I didn’t kill Selmon!’ Mullica cried out in protest, but at the same time he turned his body, and so the knife, which should have gone into his belly, sliced instead through his right forearm muscle, glanced off his equivalent to a radius and ulna, continued upward to the elbow, and jammed there, caught in the joint.
‘Jesus!’ Mullica cried, and fell back, spouting blood, confused, conscious that he could not bend either arm now, seeing the blood painting the corridor walls, stepping back farther.
‘Leave me alone!’ he blurted, falling into a couch, trying to find the pressure points in his forearm with the fingers of his left arm, which were dreadfully weak.
‘You killed Selmon,’ Eikmo repeated, grappling for the knife.
‘No! It was an accident. Why would I kill him?’ It was a nightmare. Mullica turned his head this way and that, trying to find something that would help him, insanely watching Nixon’s helicopter fly away. He didn’t know if he should stop the flow of blood before he stopped Hanig Eikmo somehow; probably. Things came and went in his head with unnatural speed. He tried to hold on to one thought, any thought, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t.
Eikmo had his hands around Mullica’s throat; Mullica was vaguely conscious that Eikmo had his knee in Mullica’s lap.
‘No! This is ridiculous, Eikmo! Help me stop the blood—’
‘No. I’m not gonna help you stop the blood.’
Mullica, in a panic, threw Eikmo off. He backed away from Eikmo, across the room. Eikmo came after him – an older Eikmo than Mullica remembered, but Eikmo, Jesus, Eikmo, he was supposed to be in Oakland, and instead— ‘Why, Eikmo?’
Eikmo had another choke hold. ‘What the hell did you kill him for?’
‘I didn’t—’
Now they were crashing through the doors to the balcony. And now he felt the railing pressing into his back. And now he was going over, and Eikmo was leaning on the railing, looking down at him, and getting smaller.
Margery came home. The front door was pushed shut, but the lock hadn’t quite found the striker plate. The apartment wall was covered in blood. She dropped the grocery bag and sprang forward. She saw a man leaning over the balcony rail. She cried out, or rather, she sucked in air, and the sound of it was a voracious rattle in her throat. She was on the balcony in a split second, and as a startled Eikmo began to turn, she placed both hands flat on his chest and pushed. No one on Earth could have resisted that push. Eikmo went toppling into space, only moments after Mullica, and crashed down through twelve floors of emptiness before impacting on the concrete sidewalk, almost exactly on the spot where Mullica lay. And finally Margery cried out; it floated down, hard on the sodden thump of Eikmo’s body. ‘Jack! Oh, Jack Mullica!’
Mullica saw the sidewalk coming up at him at an amazing rate of speed. Then there was a moment’s blackness, and then he was looking up, and Eikmo was hurtling down at him. Jack rolled out of the way. His sling and the knife were gone. He looked up, and Margery was standing there, many floors above the street, shouting something, and then he was up there, holding her in his arms, and she was looking at him with all the love in the world, and he was taking her in his arms, and she was crying with joy, saying ‘Oh, Jack Mullica! Oh, Jack Mullica,’ so he took her into the bedroom and took her in his arms, and she was tearing off her clothes and his, and he was huge, he was godlike, and they made love, and they made love, and they made love, while she kept murmuring ‘Oh, Jack Mullica!’ over and over again, wild and wanton, in his arms, beautiful in love.
– Never revealed. A.B.
Henshaw shook his head imperceptibly. He had told the widow he was with a government agency, which was true enough. Still, one had to be careful.
It was some days after the double death. The blood in the apartment had been partly cleaned up. There was new glass in the balcony doors, though the doors themselves were splintered in places and only temporarily repaired. The widow did not look good, which Henshaw found a fleeting moment to regret, because she was basically a fine-looking woman. But he was still not certifiably clear of
the disease. They still didn’t know much about it. They were beginning to suspect a long incubation period. It really didn’t matter, to him; he was going to play with nothing but his hand for the rest of his life, and that was that. And, besides – well, besides.
The widow sat at one end of the couch, very small, somehow, very much in need of something she would not get. She looked at nothing. An open decanter of scotch, mostly used up, sat on the end table. A glass, mostly drunk, was in Margery Mullica’s hand. She cried and she looked at nothing.
A television set was on, ignored, just something to fill the room a little. Henshaw actually looked for a moment, and saw that Gerald Ford had pardoned Richard Nixon. He shook his head incredulously.
‘Mrs Mullica,’ Henshaw said gently.
She looked at him with faint interest.
‘Mrs Mullica, I’ll be going in a minute.’ And leaving you completely alone. ‘It’s self-defense. That’s clear. You’ll be all right. But can you tell me why you pushed the stranger over the rail? Can you tell me that?’ There were so many other things she could have done. True, most of them wound up with the stranger killing her, too. But still—
She smiled wanly, and looked at the drink in her hand. Then she looked at Henshaw. ‘I loved him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t care. He fixed my leg. And he was the most decent man I ever knew. Or ever will know. Even if he was a Russian deserter. I didn’t care where he came from.’ She was sort of smiling, and sipping at her glass, but she had not actually, at any time, stopped crying. ‘I didn’t care where he came from,’ she said again. ‘I cared what he was. I will never find a man like him again,’ she said softly. ‘Never, never, never.’ And she continued weeping.
