The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  “Well, I want you to go over to the house and snoop around a bit.”

  “What for?” I asked. “She hasn’t come back, has she?”

  “No, but there’s some funny business over there. I got a tip that someone might have hurried her a little.”

  “This time,” I told him, “you’ve outdone yourself. You’ve been watching too many television thrillers.”

  “I got it on good authority,” he said and turned back to his work.

  So I went and got my hat and told myself it was no skin off my nose how I spent the day; I’d get paid just the same!

  But I was getting a little fed up on some of the wild goose chases to which the Barnacle was assigning not only me, but the rest of the staff as well. Sometimes they paid off; usually, they didn’t. And when they didn’t, Barnacle had the nasty habit of making it appear that the man he had sent out, not he himself, had dreamed up the chase. His “good authority” probably was no more than some casual chatter of someone next to him at the latest bar he’d honored with his cash.

  * * * *

  Old Mrs. Clayborne had been one of the last of the faded gentility which at one time had graced Douglas Avenue. The family had petered out, and she was the last of them; she had died in a big and lonely house with only a few servants, and a nurse in attendance on her, and no kin close enough to wait out her final hours in person.

  It was unlikely, I told myself, that anyone could have profited by giving her an overdose of drugs, or in any otherwise hurrying her death. And even if it were true, there’d be little chance that it could be proved; and that was the kind of story you didn’t run unless you had it down in black and white.

  I went out to the house on Douglas Avenue. It was a quiet and lovely place, standing in its fenced-in yard among the autumn-colored trees.

  There was an old gardener raking leaves, and he didn’t notice me when I went up the walk. He was an old man, pottering away and more than likely mumbling to himself, and I found out later that he was a little deaf.

  I went up the steps, rang the bell and stood waiting, feeling cold at heart and wondering what I’d say once I got inside. I couldn’t say what I had in mind; somehow or other I’d have to go about it by devious indirection.

  I needn’t have worried; I never got inside.

  A maid came to the door.

  “Good morning ma’am,” I said. “I am from the Tribune. May I come in and talk?”

  She didn’t even answer; she looked at me for a moment and then slammed the door. I told myself I might have known that was the way it would be.

  * * * *

  I turned around, went down the steps, and cut across the grounds to where the gardener was working. He didn’t notice me until I was almost upon him; when he did see me, his face sort of lit up. He dropped the rake, and sat down on the wheelbarrow. I suppose I was as good an excuse as any for him to take a breather.

  “Hello,” I said to him.

  “Nice day,” he said to me.

  “Indeed it is.”

  “You’ll have to speak up louder,” he told me; “I can’t hear a thing you say.”

  “Too bad about Mrs. Clayborne,” I told him.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “You live around here? I don’t recall your face.”

  I nodded; it wasn’t much of a lie, just twenty miles or so.

  “She was a nice old lady. Worked for her almost fifty years. It’s a blessing she is gone.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “She was dying hard,” he said.

  He sat nodding in the autumn sun and you could almost hear his mind go traveling back across those fifty years. I am certain that, momentarily, he’d forgotten I was there.

  “Nurse tells a funny story,” he said finally, speaking to himself more than he spoke to me. “It might be just imagining; Nurse was tired, you know.”

  “I heard about it,” I encouraged him.

  “Nurse left her just a minute and she swears there was something in the room when she came back again. Says it went out the window just as she came in. Too dark to see it good, she says. I told her she was imagining. Funny things happen, though; things we don’t know about.”

  “That was her room,” I said, pointing at the house. “I remember, years ago…”

  He chuckled at having caught me in the wrong. “You’re mistaken, sonny. It was the corner one; that one over there.”

  He rose from the barrow slowly and took up the rake again.

  “It was good to talk with you,” I said. “These are pretty flowers you have. Mind if I walk around and have a look at them.”

  “Might as well. Frost will get them in a week or so.”

  So I walked around the grounds, hating myself for what I had to do, and looking at the flowers, working my way closer to the corner of the house he had pointed out to me.

  There was a bed of petunias underneath the window and they were sorry-looking things. I squatted down and pretended I was admiring them, although all the time I was looking for some evidence that someone might have jumped out the window.

  I didn’t expect to find it, but I did.

  There, in a little piece of soft earth where the petunias had petered out, was a footprint—well, not a footprint, either, maybe, but anyhow a print. It looked something like a duck track—except that the duck that made it would have had to be as big as a good-sized dog.

  I squatted on the walk, staring at it and I could feel spiders on my spine. Finally I got up and walked away, forcing myself to saunter when my body screamed to run.

  Outside the gate, I did run.

  I got to a phone as fast as I could, at a corner drugstore, and sat in the booth awhile to get my breathing back to normal before I put in a call to the city desk.

  The Barnacle bellowed at me. “What you got?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing. Who was Mrs. Clayborne’s doctor?”

  He told me. I asked him if he knew who her nurse had been, and he asked me how the hell should he know so I hung up.

  I went to see the doctor and he threw me out.

  I spent the rest of the day tracking down the nurse; when I finally found her she threw me out too. So there was a full day’s work gone entirely down the drain.

  It was late in the afternoon when I got back to the office. Barnacle Bill pounced on me at once. “What you get?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. There was no use telling him about that track underneath the window. By that time, I was beginning to doubt I’d ever seen it, it seemed so unbelievable.

  “How big do ducks get?” I asked him. He growled at me and went back to his work.

  I looked at the next day’s page in the assignment book. He had me down for the community chest, and See Dr. Thomas at Univ.—magnetism.

  “What’s this?” I asked. “This magnetism business?”

  “Guy’s been working on it for years,” said the Barnacle. “I got it on good authority he’s set to pop with something.”

  There was that “good authority” again. And just about as hazy as the most of his hot tips.

  And anyhow, I don’t like to interview scientists. More often than not, they’re a crotchety set and are apt to look down their noses at newspapermen. Ten to one the newspaperman is earning more than they are—and in his own way, more than likely, doing just as good a job and with less fumbling.

  II

  I saw that Jo Ann was getting ready to go home, so I walked over to her and asked her how it went.

  “I got a funny feeling in my gizzard, Mark,” she told me. “Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  So we went down to the corner bar and took a booth way in the back.

  Joe came over and he was grumbling about business, which was unusual for him. “If it weren’t for you folks over at the paper,” he said, “I’d close up and go home. That must be what all my customers are doing; they sure ain’t coming here. Can you think of anything more disgusting than going straight home from your
job?”

  We told him that we couldn’t, and to show that he appreciated our attitude he wiped off the table—a thing he almost never did.

  He brought the drinks and Jo Ann told me about the old lady and her hundredth birthday. “It was horrible. There she sat in her rocking chair in that bare living-room, rocking back and forth, gently, delicately, the way old ladies rock. And she was glad to see me, and she smiled so nice and she introduced me all around.”

  “Well, that was fine,” I said. “Were there a lot of people there?”

  “Not a soul.”

  I choked on my drink. “But you said she introduced…”

  “She did. To empty chairs.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “They all were dead,” she said.

  “Now, let’s get this straight…”

  “She said, ‘Miss Evans, I want you to meet my old friend, Mrs. Smith. She lives just down the street. I recall the day she moved into the neighborhood, back in ’33. Those were hard times, I tell you.’ Chattering on, you know like most old ladies do. And me, standing there and staring at an empty chair, wondering what to do. And, Mark, I don’t know if I did right or not, but I said, ‘Hello, Mrs. Smith. I am glad to know you.’ And do you know what happened then?”

  “No,” I said. “How could I?”

  “The old lady said, just as casually as could be—just conversationally, as if it were the most natural thing in all the world—‘You know, Miss Evans, Mrs. Smith died three years ago. Don’t you think it’s nice she dropped in to see me.’”

  “She was pulling your leg,” I said. “Some of these old ones sometimes get pretty sly.”

  “I don’t think she was. She introduced me all around; there were six or seven of them, and all of them were dead.”

  “She was happy, thinking they were there. What difference does it make?”

  “It was horrible,” said Jo Ann.

  So we had another drink to chase away the horror.

  * * * *

  Joe still was down in the mouth. “Did you ever see the like of it? You could shoot off a cannon in this joint and not touch a single soul. By this time, usually, they’d be lined up against the bar, and it’d be a dull evening if someone hadn’t taken a poke at someone else—although you understand I run a decent place.”

  “Sure you do,” I said. “Sit down and have a drink with us.”

  “It ain’t right that I should,” said Joe. “A bartender should never take a drink when he’s conducting business. But I feel so low that if you don’t mind, I’ll take you up on it.”

  He went back to the bar and got a bottle and a glass and we had quite a few.

  The corner, he said, had always been a good spot—steady business all the time, with a rush at noon and a good crowd in the evening. But business had started dropping off six weeks before, and now was down to nothing.

  “It’s the same all over town,” he said, “some places worse than others. This place is one of the worst; I just don’t know what’s gotten into people.”

  We said we didn’t, either. I fished out some money and left it for the drinks, and we made our escape.

  Outside I asked Jo Ann to have dinner with me, but she said it was the night her bridge club met, so I drove her home and went on to my place.

  I take a lot of ribbing at the office for living so far out of town, but I like it. I got the cottage cheap, and it’s better than living in a couple of cooped-up rooms in a third-rate resident hotel—which would be the best I could afford if I stayed in town.

  After I’d fixed up a steak and some fried potatoes for supper, I went down to the dock and rowed out into the lake a ways. I sat there for a while, watching the lighted windows winking all around the shore and listening to the sounds you never hear in daytime—the muskrat swimming and the soft chuckling of the ducks and the occasional slap of a jumping fish.

  * * * *

  It was a bit chilly and after a little while I rowed back in again, thinking there was a lot to do before winter came. The boat should be caulked and painted; the cottage itself could take a coat of paint, if I could get around to it. There were a couple of storm windows that needed glass replaced, and by rights I should putty all of them. The chimney needed some bricks to replace the ones that had blown off in a windstorm earlier in the year, and the door should have new weatherstripping.

  I sat around and read a while and then I went to bed. Just before I went to sleep I thought some about the two old ladies—one of them happy and the other dead.

  The next morning I got the community chest story out of the way, first thing; then I got an encyclopedia from the library and did some reading on magnetism. I figured that I should know something about it, before I saw this whiz-bang at the university.

  But I needn’t have worried so much; this Dr. Thomas turned out to be a regular Joe. We sat around and had quite a talk. He told me about magnetism, and when he found out I lived at the lake he talked about fishing; then we found we knew some of the same people, and it was all right.

  Except he didn’t have a story.

  “There may be one in another year or so,” he told me. “When there is, I’ll let you in on it.”

  I’d heard that one before, of course, so I tried to pin him down.

  “It’s a promise,” he said; “you get it first, ahead of anyone.”

  I let it go at that. You couldn’t ask the man to sign a contract on it.

  I was watching a chance to get away, but I could see he still had more to say. So I stayed on; it’s refreshing to find someone who wants to talk to you.

  “I think there’ll be a story,” he said, looking worried, as if he were afraid there mightn’t be. “I’ve worked on it for years. Magnetism is still one of the phenomena we don’t know too much about. Once we knew nothing about electricity, and even now we do not entirely understand it; but we found out about it, and when we knew enough about it, we put it to work. We could do the same with magnetism, perhaps—if we only could determine the first fundamentals of it.”

  He stopped and looked straight at me. “When you were a kid, did you believe in brownies?”

  That one threw me and he must have seen it did.

  “You remember—the little helpful people. If they liked you, they did all sorts of things for you; and all they expected of you was that you’d leave out a bowl of milk for them.”

  I told him I’d read the stories, and I supposed that at one time I must have believed in them—although right at the moment I couldn’t swear I had.

  “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think I had brownies in this lab. Someone—or something—shuffled my notes for me. I’d left them on the desktop held down with a paperweight; the next morning, they were spread all over, and part of them dumped onto the floor.”

  “A cleaning woman,” I suggested.

  He smiled at my suggestion. “I’m the cleaning woman here.”

  * * * *

  I thought he had finished and I wondered why all this talk of notes and brownies. I was reaching for my hat when he told me the rest of it.

  “There were two sheets of the notes still underneath the paperweight,” he said. “One of them had been folded carefully. I was about to pick them up, and put them with the other sheets so I could sort them later, when I happened to read what was on those sheets beneath the paperweight.”

  He drew a long breath. “They were two sections of my notes that, if left to myself, I probably never would have tied together. Sometimes we have strange blind spots; sometimes we look so closely to a thing that we are blinded to it. And there it was—two sheets laid there by accident. Two sheets, one of them folded to tie up with the other, to show me a possibility I’d never thought of otherwise. I’ve been working on that possibility ever since; I have hopes it may work out.”

  “When it does…” I said.

  “It is yours,” he told me.

  I got my hat and left.

  And I thought idly of brownies all the way b
ack to the office.

  * * * *

  I had just got back to the office, and settled down for an hour or two of loafing, when old J. H.—our publisher—made one of his irregular pilgrimages of good will out into the newsroom. J. H. is a pompous windbag, without a sincere bone in his body; he knows we know this and we know he knows—but he, and all the rest of us, carry out the comedy of good fellowship to its bitter end.

  He stopped beside my desk, clapped me on the shoulder, and said in a voice that boomed throughout the newsroom: “That’s a tremendous job you’re doing on the community chest, my boy.”

  Feeling a little sick and silly, I got to my feet and said, “Thank you, J. H.; it’s nice of you to say so.”

  Which was what was expected of me. It was almost ritual.

  He grabbed me by the hand, put the other hand on my shoulder, shook my hand vigorously and squeezed my shoulder hard. And I’ll be damned if there weren’t tears in his eyes as he told me, “You just stick around, Mark, and keep up the work. You won’t regret it for a minute. We may not always show it, but we appreciate good work and loyalty and we’re always watching what you do out here.”

  Then he dropped me like a hot potato and went on with his greetings.

  I sat down again; the rest of the day was ruined for me. I told myself that if I deserved any commendation I could have hoped it would be for something other than the community chest stories. They were lousy stories; I knew it, and so did the Barnacle and all the rest of them. No one blamed me for their being lousy—you can’t write anything but a lousy story on a community chest drive. But they weren’t cheering me.

  And I had a sinking feeling that, somehow, old J. H. had found out about the applications I had planted with a half dozen other papers and that this was his gentle way of letting me know he knew—and that I had better watch my step.

  III

  Just before noon, Steve Johnson—who handles the medical run along with whatever else the Barnacle can find for him to do—came over to my desk. He had a bunch of clippings in his hand and he was looking worried. “I hate to ask you this, Mark,” he said, “but would you help me out?”

  “Sure thing, Steve.”

  “It’s an operation. I have to check on it, but I won’t have the time. I got to run out to the airport and catch an interview.”