"By Andrew Gill," the veteran said. "Say, I'd like to buy a whole one from you; I'll pay you a dime."
"They're worth fifteen cents apiece," Stuart said. "They have to come all the way around Black Point and Sears' Point and along the Lucas Valley Road, from beyond Nicasio somewhere."
"I had one of those Andrew Gill deluxe special Gold Labels one time," the veteran said. "It fell out of the pocket of some man who was getting on the ferry; I fished it out of the water and dried it." All of a sudden Stuart handed him the butt.
"For God's sake," the veteran said, not looking directly at him. He rowed rapidly, his lips moving, his eyelids blinking.
"I got more," Stuart said.
The veteran said, "I'll tell you what else you got; you got real humanity, mister, and that's rare today. Very rare."
Stuart nodded. He felt the truth of the veteran's words.
The little Keller girl sat shivering on the examination table, and Doctor Stockstill, surveying her thin, pale body, thought of a joke which he had seen on television years ago, long before the war. A Spanish ventriloquist, speaking through a chicken... the chicken had produced an egg.
"My son," the chicken said, meaning the egg.
"Are you sure?" the ventriloquist asked. "It's not your daughter?"
And the chicken, with dignity, answered, "I know my business."
This child was Bonny Keller's daughter, but, Doctor Stockstill thought, it isn't George Keller's daughter; I am certain of that... I know my business. Who had Bonny been having an affair with, seven years ago? The child must have been conceived very close to the day the war began. But she had not been conceived before the bombs fell; that was clear. Perhaps it was on that very day, he ruminated. Just like Bonny, to rush out while the bombs were falling, while the world was coming to an end, to have a brief, frenzied spasm of love with someone, perhaps with some man she did not even know, the first man she happened onto... and now this.
The child smiled at him and he smiled back. Superficially, Edie Keller appeared normal; she did not seem to be a funny child. How he wished, God damn it, that he had an x-ray machine. Because--
He said aloud, "Tell me more about your brother."
"Well," Edie Keller said in her frail, soft voice, "I talk to my brother all the time and sometimes he answers for a while but more often he's asleep. He sleeps almost all the time."
"Is he asleep now?"
For a moment the child was silent. "No," she answered.
Rising to his feet and coming over to her, Doctor Stockstill said, "I want you to show me exactly where he is."
The child pointed to her left side, low down; near, he thought, the appendix. The pain was there. That had brought the child in; Bonny and George had become worried. They knew about the brother, but they assumed him to be imaginary, a pretend playmate which kept their little daughter company. He himself had assumed so at first; the chart did not mention a brother, and yet Edie talked about him. Bill was exactly the same age as she. Born, Edie had informed the doctor, at the same time as she, of course.
"Why of course?" he had asked, as he began examining her--he had sent the parents into the other room because the child seemed reticent in front of them.
Edie had answered in her calm, solemn way. "Because he's my twin brother. How else could he be inside me?" And, like the Spanish ventriloquist's chicken, she spoke with authority, with confidence; she, too, knew her business.
In the seven years since the war Doctor Stockstill had examined many hundreds of funny people, many strange and exotic variants on the human life form which flourished now under a much more tolerant--although smokily veiled--sky. He could not be shocked. And yet, this--a child whose brother lived inside her body, down in the inguinal region. For seven years Bill Keller had dwelt inside there, and Doctor Stockstill, listening to the girl, believed her; he knew it was possible. It was not the first case of this kind. If he had his x-ray machine he would be able to see the tiny, wizened shape, probably no larger than a baby rabbit. In fact, with his hands he could feel the outline... he touched her side, carefully noting the firm cyst-like sack within. The head in a normal position, the body entirely within the abdominal cavity, limbs and all. Someday the girl would die and they would open her body, perform an autopsy; they would find a little wrinkled male figure, perhaps with a snowy beard and blind eyes... her brother, still no larger that a baby rabbit.
Meanwhile, Bill slept mostly, but now and then he and his sister talked. What did Bill have to say? What possibly could he know?
To the question, Edie had an answer. "Well, he doesn't know very much. He doesn't see anything but he thinks. And I tell him what's going on so he doesn't miss out."
"What are his interests?" Stockstill asked.
Edie considered and said, "Well, he, uh, likes to hear about food."
"Food!" Stockstill said, fascinated.
"Yes. He doesn't eat, you know. He likes me to tell him over and over again what I had for dinner, because he does get it after a while... I think he does, anyhow. Wouldn't he have to, to live?"
"Yes," Stockstill agreed.
"He especially likes it if I have apples or oranges. And--he likes to hear stories. He always wants to hear about places, far-away especially like New York. I want to take him there someday, so he can see what it's like. I mean, so I can see and then tell him."
"You take good care of him, don't you?" Stockstill said, deeply touched. To the girl, it was normal; she had lived like this always--she did not know of any other existence.
"I'm afraid," she said suddenly, "that he might die someday."
"I don't think he will," Stockstill said. "What's more likely to happen is that he'll get larger. And that might pose a problem; it might be hard for your body to accommodate him."
"Would he be born, then?" Edie regarded him with large, dark eyes.
"No," Stockstill said. "He's not located that way. He'd have to be removed--surgically. But he wouldn't live. The only way he can live is as he is now, inside you." Parasitically, he thought, not saying the word. "We'll worry about that when the time comes, if it ever does."
Edie said, "I'm glad I have a brother; he keeps me from being lonely. Even when he's asleep I can feel him there, I know he's there. It's like having a baby inside me; I can't wheel him around in a baby carriage or anything like that, or dress him, but talking to him is a lot of fun. For instance, I get to tell him about Mildred."
"Mildred!" He was puzzled.
"You know." The child smiled at his ignorance. "The woman that keeps coming back to Philip. And spoils his life. We listen every night. The satellite."
"Of course." It was Walt Dangerfield's reading of the Maugham book, the disc jockey as he passed in his daily orbit above their heads. Eerie, Doctor Stockstill thought, this parasite dwelling within her body, in unchanging moisture and darkness, fed by her blood, hearing from her in some unfathomable fashion a second-hand account of a famous novel... it makes Bill Keller part of our culture. He leads his grotesque social existence, too... God knows what he makes of the story. Does he have fantasies about it, about our life? Does he dream about us?
Bending, Doctor Stockstill kissed the girl on her forehead. "Okay," he said. "You can go, now. I'll talk to your mother and father for a minute; there're some very old genuine pre-war magazines out in the waiting room that you can read."
When he opened the door, George and Bonny Keller rose to their feet, faces taut with anxiety.
"Come in," Stockstill said to them. And shut the door after them. He had already decided not to tell them the truth about their daughter... and, he thought, about their son. Better they did not know.
When Stuart McConchie returned to the East Bay from his trip to the peninsula he found that someone--no doubt a group of veterans living under the pier--had killed and eaten his horse, Edward Prince of Wales. All that remained was the skeleton, legs and head, a heap worthless to him or to anyone else. He stood by it, pondering. Well, it had been a costly trip. A
nd he had arrived too late anyhow; the farmer, at a penny apiece, had already disposed of the electronic parts of his Soviet missile.
Mr. Hardy would supply another horse, no doubt, but he had been fond of Edward. And it was wrong to kill a horse for food because they were so vitally needed for other purposes; they were the mainstay of transportation, now that most of the wood had been consumed by the wood-burning cars and by people in cellars using it in the winter to keep warm. And horses were needed in the job of reconstruction--they were the main source of power, in the absence of electricity. The stupidity of killing Edward Prince of Wales maddened him; it was, he thought, like barbarism, the thing they all feared. It was anarchy, and right in the middle of the city; right in downtown Oakland, in broad day. It was what he would expect the Red Chinese to do.
Now, on foot, he walked slowly toward San Pablo Avenue. The sun had begun to descend into the lavish, extensive sunset which they had become accustomed to seeing in the years since the Emergency. He scarcely noticed it. Maybe I ought to go into some other business, he said to himself. Small animal traps--it's a living, but there's no advancement possible in it. I mean, where can you rise to in a business like that?
The loss of his horse had depressed him; he gazed down at the broken, grass-infested sidewalk as he picked his way along, past the rubble which had once been factories. From a burrow in a vacant lot something with eager eyes noted his passing; something, he surmised gloomily, that ought to be hanging by its hind legs minus its skin.
These ruins, the smoky, flickering pallor of the sky... the eager eyes still following him as the creature calculated whether it could safely attack him. Bending, he picked up a hunk of concrete and chucked it at the burrow--a dense layer of organic and inorganic material packed tightly, glued in place by some sort of white slime. The creature had emulsified debris lying around, had reformed it into a usable paste. Must be a brilliant animal, he thought. But he did not care.
I've evolved, too, he said to himself. My wits are much clearer than they formerly were; I'm a match for you any time. So give up.
Evolved, he thought, but no better off then I was before the goddam Emergency; I sold TV sets then and now I sell electronic vermin traps. What is the difference? One's as bad as the other. I'm going downhill, in fact.
A whole day wasted. In two hours it would be dark and he would be going to sleep, down in the cat-pelt-lined basement room which Mr. Hardy rented him for a dollar in silver a month. Of course, he could light his fat lamp; he could burn it for a little while, read a book or part of a book--most of his library consisted of merely sections of books, the remaining portions having been destroyed or lost. Or he could visit old Mr. and Mrs. Hardy and sit in on the evening transmission from the satellite.
After all, he had personally radioed a request to Dangerfield just the other day, from the transmitter out on the mudflats in West Richmond. He had asked for "Good Rockin' Tonight," an old-fashioned favorite which he remembered from his childhood. It was not known if Dangerfield had that tune in his miles of tapes, however, so perhaps he was waiting in vain. As he walked along he sang to himself:
Oh I heard the news:
There's good rockin' tonight.
Oh I heard the news!
There's good rockin' tonight!
Tonight I'll be a mighty fine man,
I'll hold my baby as tight as I can--
It brought tears to his eyes to remember one of the old songs, from the world the way it was. All gone now, he said to himself. And what do we have instead, a rat that can play the nose flute, and not even that because the rat got run over.
I'll bet the rat couldn't play that, he said to himself. Not in a million years. That's practically sacred music. Out of our past, that no brilliant animal and no funny person can share. The past belongs only to us genuine human beings.
While he was thinking that he arrived on San Pablo Avenue with its little shops open here and there, little shacks which sold everything from coat hangers to hay. One of them, not far off, was Hardy's Homeostatic Vermin Traps, and he headed in that direction.
As he entered, Mr. Hardy glanced up from his assembly table in the rear; he worked under the white light of an arc lamp, and all around him lay heaps of electronic parts scavenged from every region of Northern California. Many had come from the ruins out in Livermore; Mr. Hardy had connections with State Officials and they had permitted him to dig there in the restricted deposits.
In former times Dean Hardy had been an engineer for an AM radio station; he was a slender, quiet-spoken elderly man who wore a sweater and necktie even now--and a tie was rare, in these times.
"They ate my horse." Stuart seated himself opposite Hardy.
At once Ella Hardy, his employer's wife, appeared from the living quarters in the rear; she had been fixing dinner. "You left him?"
"Yes," he admitted. "I thought he was safe out on the City of Oakland public ferry pier; there's an official there who--"
"It happens all the time," Hardy said wearily. "The bastards. Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; those war vets are down there by the hundreds. What about the car? You had to leave it."
"I'm sorry," Stuart said.
"Forget it," Hardy said. "We have more horses out at our Orinda store. What about parts from the rocket?"
"No luck," Stuart said. "All gone when I got there. Except for this." He held up a handful of transistors. "The farmer didn't notice these; I picked them up for nothing. I don't know if they're any good, though." Carrying them over to the assembly table he laid them down. "Not much for an all-day trip." He felt more glum than ever.
Without a word, Ella Hardy returned to the kitchen; the curtain closed after her.
"You want to have some dinner with us?" Hardy said, shutting off his light and removing his glasses.
"I don't know," Stuart said. "I feel strange." He roamed about the shop. "Over on the other side of the Bay I saw something I've heard about but didn't believe. A flying animal like a bat but not a bat. More like a weasel, very skinny and long, with a big head. They call them tommies because they're always gliding up against windows and looking in, like peeping toms."
Hardy said, "It's a squirrel." He leaned back in his chair, loosened his necktie. "They evolved from the squirrels in Golden Gate Park. I once had a scheme for them... they could be useful--in theory, at least--as message carriers. They can glide or fly or whatever they do for almost a mile. But they're too feral. I gave it up after catching one." He held up his right hand. "Look at the scar, there on my thumb. That's from a tom."
"This man I talked to said they taste good. Like old-time chicken. They sell them at stalls in downtown San Francisco; you see old ladies selling them cooked for a quarter apiece, still hot, very fresh."
"Don't try one," Hardy said. "Many of them are toxic. It has to do with their diet."
"Hardy," Stuart said suddenly, "I want to get out of the city and out into the country."
His employer regarded him.
"It's too brutal here," Stuart said.
"It's brutal everywhere." He added, "And out in the country it's hard to make a living."
"Do you sell any traps in the country?"
"No," Hardy said. "Vermin live in towns, where there's ruins. You know that. Stuart, you're a woolgatherer. The country is sterile; you'd miss the flow of ideas that you have here in the city. Nothing happens, they just farm and listen to the satellite."
"I'd like to take a line of traps out say around Napa and Sonoma," Stuart persisted. "I could trade them for wine, maybe; they grow grapes up there, I understand, like they used to."
"But it doesn't taste the same," Hardy said. "The ground is too altered." He shook his head. "Really awful. Foul."
"They drink it, though," Stuart said. "I've seen it here in town, brought in on those old wood-burning trucks."
"People will drink anything they can get their hands on now." Hardy raised his head and said thoughtfully, "You know who has liquor? I mean
the genuine thing; you can't tell if it's pre-war that he's dug up or new that he's made."
"Nobody in the Bay Area."
"Andrew Gill, the tobacco expert. Oh, he doesn't sell much. I've seen one bottle, a fifth of brandy. I had one single drink from it." Hardy smiled at him crookedly, his lips twitching. "You would have liked it."
"How much does he want for it?"
"More than you have to pay."
I wonder what sort of a man Andrew Gill is, Stuart said to himself. Big, maybe, with a beard, a vest... walking with a silver-headed cane; a giant of a man with wavy hair, imported monocle--I can picture him.
Seeing the expression on Stuart's face, Hardy leaned toward him. "I can tell you what else he sells. Girly photos. In artistic poses--you know."
"Aw Christ," Stuart said, his imagination boggling; it was too much. "I don't believe it."
"God's truth. Genuine pre-war girly calendars, from as far back as 1950. They're worth a fortune, of course. I've heard of a thousand silver dollars changing hands over a 1963 Playboy calendar." Now Hardy had become pensive; he gazed off into space.
"Where I worked when the bomb fell," Stuart said, "at Modern TV Sales & Service, we had a lot of girly calendars downstairs in the repair department. They were all incinerated, naturally." At least so he had always assumed. "Suppose a person were poking around in the ruins somewhere and he came onto an entire warehouse full of girly calendars. Can you imagine that?" His mind raced. "How much could he get? Millions! He could trade them for real estate; he could acquire a whole county!"
"Right," Hardy said, nodding.
"I mean, he'd be rich forever. They make a few in the Orient, in Tokyo, but they're no good."
"I've seen them," Hardy agreed. "They're crude. The knowledge of how to do it has declined, passed into oblivion; it's an art that has died out. Maybe forever."
Collected Stories 5 - The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories Page 11
