The fat man looked blank. “Harris? Who’s he?”
“The fellow in Denver who wanted you to investigate everybody in New York who had had a big and unexpected windfall within the past year.”
Blotz snorted impatiently. “That nut! Aw, tell him anything.”
“Give me a for-instance.”
“Tell him …” Blotz leaned heavily back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “Tell him that World Wide Investigations assigned its best operatives to the case and that in sixteen cases out of twenty … No, better make it twenty-nine out of thirty-four … That way he’ll really feel he’s getting his money’s worth.”
“All right, in twenty-nine out of thirty-four cases what?”
“Don’t rush me.” Blotz pulled a bottle of cheap blend out of his drawer and eyed the remaining inch regretfully.
“You know the doctor said your heart wouldn’t take much more of that.”
The fat man shrugged and tossed the liquor down. As his eyes wandered around the office in search of inspiration, they came to rest on the radio.
“That’s it!” he exclaimed.
“What’s it?”
“The Ghoul! For once crime pays somebody but the actors and the script writers. Tell Harris that in whatever it was out of whatever it was cases, the individuals concerned visited small shops they had never noticed before and were sold objects whose nature they refused to reveal by a strange old man.”
Janie looked up from her shorthand pad. “Is that all?”
“No, we need a clincher.” He thought for a minute. “How’s this? In each case when they went back and tried to find the shop it had disappeared.”
“You ought to try writing radio scripts yourself.”
“Too much work,” said Blotz. “I like the mail order detective business better.” He looked regretfully at the empty bottle and then back at Janie. “While you’re at it you might as well tell that yokel that for five bills World Wide will find the shop for him and buy him one of those dingbats.”
Janie’s lips tightened. “Doesn’t your conscience ever bother you?”
Blotz let out a nasty laugh. “If it weren’t for the suckers I’d have to work for a living. This way it’s a breeze. Some old dame in Podunk hasn’t heard from her kid since he took off for the big city and gets worried about him. He doesn’t answer her letters and then one day she sees my ad in the Podunk Gazette and sends me fifty bucks to go look for him. How come you asked?”
“Because mine bothers me. Every day I work here I feel dirtier. ”
Blotz grinned. “Then quit.”
“I’ve been thinking of that. At least I’d be able to sleep nights.”
“But you wouldn’t be eating so regular. Face it, kid— nobody is going to hire a gimpy sparrow like you unless he’s a big-hearted guy like me. And there ain’t many around.”
Janie looked from him to the pair of worn crutches that leaned against the wall.
“Yeah,” she said as she started punching out the letter to Harris. “Yeah, there sure ain’t.”
Mr. Blotz’s pulse was finally back to normal but he still couldn’t tear his eyes away from the crisp green slip of paper that bore the magic figures $500.00 and the name of a Denver bank.
“He bit,” he said in an awed voice. “He really bit. May wonders, and suckers, never cease.” He rubbed his fat hands together nervously. “I’d better get this to the bank and cash it before something happens.”
Half an hour later he was back, carefully stacking bottles of bonded bourbon into his desk drawers. When they were arranged to his satisfaction, he leaned back and hoisted his feet on the desk.
“Take a letter to Harris.”
Janie obediently took out her shorthand pad.
“Usual heading. Eh … oh, something like this. “Pursuant to your instructions, my agents in all the major cities have been instructed to check for little shops they don’t remember having seen before. They are to be especially alert for basement stores with dusty signs in the window with wordings like we sell thrings or shottle bop. Upon discovery they are to enter immediately. If a small aged man appears from the rear of the shop and presses them to buy something, they are to do so. Once they leave they are to make careful note of the shop’s location and walk around the block. If when they return the shop has disappeared, they are immediately to send their purchase to you.’”
Blotz paused, took a bottle out of his drawer, and uncapped it. “Put something in about unexpectedly heavy expenses at the end. If we play this right we may be able to tap him again. In the meantime we’d better have something ready to send him just in case.”
“What kind of a something?” asked Janie.
“Who cares? Go over on Third and prowl some of those junk shops. Pick up something small—that’ll keep the postage down—and old.”
The little secretary pulled herself painfully to her feet, draped a threadbare coat over her humped back, and took her crutches from beside her typing desk.
“Just don’t go over a dollar,” added Blotz quickly.
She started toward the door and then turned and stood blinking at him through thick lensed glasses that made her eyes appear twice their normal size.
“Well?” he barked.
“I haven’t got a dollar.”
With a pained expression on his face he fumbled in an old coin purse. He reluctantly pulled out a quarter, then another, and then finally another.
“Here,” he said, “see what you can do for seventy-five cents.”
Blotz was deep in his bottle when Janie finally came hobbling back and placed a small paper-wrapped package on his desk.
“Any change?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It was funny,” she ventured. “I mean after what you said about shottles and thrings—”
“Well, open it up,” he interrupted. “Let’s see what Harris is getting for his money.”
“—all this shop had in front,” she went on hesitantly, “was just one sign. It said: thimgs.”
“Poor bastard that owns it, I guess. Some people have funny names,” said Blotz. “Go on—open it.”
With fingers that trembled slightly she tore off the brown paper wrapping. Inside was a small corroded brass cylinder that on first glance looked like an old plumbing fixture.
“You paid seventy-five cents for that?” said Blotz in annoyance. “They saw you coming, kid.” He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. On second look he realized that there was more to it than he had first thought. Through the heavy green patina he could make out a series of strange characters. At one end was a knob that seemed to be made out of a slightly different metal than the cylinder proper.
“I give up, what is it?” he asked.
Janie shuddered. “I wish I knew,” she said. “I wish I knew. ”
Blotz frowned and took hold of the knob. He was about to twist it when a sudden thought occurred to him. It might explode or do something equally unpleasant.
“Here, you try it,” he said to Janie. “It seems to be stuck.”
She reached out a trembling hand and then jerked it back. “I’m afraid. The man in the shop said—”
“Take it!” he barked. “When I tell you to do something, you do it. And no back talk!”
In frightened obedience she took the cylinder and twisted the knob. For a moment nothing happened, and then with an odd flickering she vanished. Before Blotz had a chance to react properly to the sudden emptiness of the office, she was back. At least a not very reasonable facsimile was.
She might have passed for her sister, there was a strong family resemblance, but the pathetic twist in her spine was gone and so was its accompanying hump. She was thirty pounds heavier, and all the pounds were in the right places. She was—and the realization hit Blotz like a hammer blow as he stood gaping at her—one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
The first thing she did was to pull off her thick-lensed glasses and throw them in the wastebasket. The first
thing Blotz did was to grab a bottle out of his desk. He took several long gulps, shook his head, and shuddered.
“It’s when you’re half drunk that things get twisty,” he mumbled. “I’m just going to sit here with my eyes shut until I’m drunk enough to get back to normal.” He counted to twenty slowly as the fireball in his stomach expanded and trickled a semi-sense of well being through his extremities. Then, as the nightmare slowly dispelled, he let out a long sigh of relief and opened his eyes.
She was still there!
There was a strange smile on her face that he didn’t like.
“Where … ?What … ?” Blotz’s vocal cords stopped operating and he just sat there and quivered. She laid the little bronze cylinder down on the desk in front of him.
“Here,” she said softly. “You can go there too if you want to.”
“Where?” whispered Blotz.
“1 don’t know. It’s someplace else, a tremendous place with rooms filled with whirring machines. There was a man there and he asked what I wanted and I told him. So he did a little re-editing and here lam.”
“Magic,” said Blotz hoarsely. “Black magic, that’s what it is. But …” His voice trailed off.
“But you don’t believe in magic. Is that what you were going to say?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “But I do. People like me have to. It’s the only way we can keep going. But magic has a funny way of working. Do you know what I was thinking after the little man asked me what 1 wanted?”
Blotz moistened his thick lips and shook his head as if hypnotized.
“I was thinking that in spite of the way things look, there’s just one thing you can always count on.”
“Yeah?”
“People always end up getting what they got coming.”
Blotz let out a half-hysterical laugh. “Then where’s mine? Why does a guy with my brains have to scrabble out a living with a two-bit outfit like this?” He raved on for a minute and then got control of himself. The liquor helped. After he’d taken a couple more gulps from his bottle he still couldn’t look what had happened squarely in the face, but with the abatement of the first shock came a gradual return of the old sense of mastery that had made him hire Janie in the first place, rather than some less experienced but more feminine—and amiable—typist.
As an awareness of the physical changes that had taken place began to grow, he found his eyes sliding greedily over her. The change hadn’t extended to her dress. The garment that had been more than adequate covering for the twisted and scrawny little body she had occupied up until a few minutes before threatened to split at the thrusting of the rich new curves that strained against it.
“You know, Janie,” he said slowly, “seeing as it was my money that got you what you got, that kind of makes me the copyright owner. ” Grabbing hold of the edge of his desk, he pulled himself to his feet and lurched toward her. When he put one flabby arm around her, she didn’t pull away. Emboldened, he let his hand slip down and begin to fumble with the buttons on her blouse.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you/’ she said in a strange voice.
“But you ain’t me. That’s what makes it so nice for both of us.”
His fumbling fingers had managed to unfasten the first button and his thick lips began to march like twin slugs over the soft curve of her shoulder.
She acted as if he were still on the other side of the room.
“It took more courage than I thought I had in me but I asked him to give me just what I deserved.”
“Him? Oh, yeah. Well that’s me, baby,” said Blotz thickly as he went to work on the second button.
“You could have been,” she said in the same distant voice. “That was the chance I was taking.”
The second button was obstinate. Blotz gave an impatient yank that caused the worn fabric to rip in his hands. As if aware of them for the first time, she shrugged herself free. As Blotz grunted and grabbed for her, he felt a sudden wrenching, stabbing pain lance through his chest, and then with no transition at all he found himself falling. He slumped against the desk, and as his plump fingers scrabbled against the smooth surface, trying to secure a hold that would keep him from plummeting down into darkness, they touched the worn bronze cylinder. As he slid on down, face purple and eyeballs bulging, more through instinct than conscious volition he found and twisted the serrated knob at one end. There was an immediate release, a translation into someplace else. He was standing again and the pain was gone, but except for a tiny glowing spot in front of him, it was darker than he had ever known before.
“Janie,” he whimpered. “Janie.”
His voice echoed metallically from distant walls. He turned to run but there was no place to run to, only the darkness. He had a sudden vision of unseen pits and crevasses, and froze where he stood. And then, unable to stand his own immobility, he inched cautiously toward the tiny spot of light, testing the whatever-it-was under his feet with each sliding step.
At last he was able to touch it, a cold luminous circle set in a smooth steel wall at chest height. As he moved his arm toward it, the hand that still held the bronze cylinder jerked forward of its own volition, pulling his arm with it, and plunged into the glowing circle. There was a clicking of relays and then glaring overhead lights went on.
He had been wise to check his footing. He was standing on a catwalk that arched dizzily over a several-acre expanse of strange whirring machinery. There were no guard rails, only a narrow tongue of metal that stretched out from some spot lost in the murky distance until it reached the smooth metal wall before which he stood. Then with a whining sound, a door opened in front of him. An invisible force pushed him through and he found himself in a great vault-like room whose walls were covered with countless tiny winking lights and bank upon bank of intricate controls. As the door clanged shut behind him, a little ball of shimmering light bounced across the floor toward him, expanded, wavered, and then suddenly took the shape of a harassed-faced little man with burning, deep-set eyes and a long white beard.
“Well,” he said impatiently, “out with it!”
Blotz didn’t say anything for a minute. He couldn’t. When he finally got partial control of his vocal cords all that came out was an almost incoherent series of who’s, what’s and how’s. The little man interrupted him with an impatient gesture.
“Stop sputtering” he said testily. “I’m tired of sputtering. This may be new to you but it isn’t to me. You’re the four-hundred-and-thirty-six-thousand-three-hundred-and-fifty-ninth mortal to get hold of one of the keys, and you’re also the four-hundred-and-thirty-six-thousand-three-hundred-and-fifty-ninth sputterer. Damn the M.W. boys, anyway!”
“M.W.?” Blotz was sparring for enough time to get his own thinking organized. What steadied him was the thought that, fantastic as all this was, Janie had been here before him, and Janie had somehow managed to snag herself a jackpot. His first job was to find out enough about the situation to angle it around to his own advantage.
“Mysterious Ways. It’s a special department in the home office that specializes in making life more complicated for the Guardians, fm a Guardian,” the little man added gloomily.
“After Reward and Punishment switched their records section over to completely automatic operation, somebody in M.W. came up with the bright idea that humans should still have some sort of a chance for personal attention. So they made up a few widgets like the one you got hold of and scattered them around at random.” He gave a dry cough. “Not that you’ve got much when you do get hold of one. All that comes with it is the right to a little personal re-editing of your future—and even that is controlled by the Prime Directive.”
Blotz’s eyes narrowed slightly. So he had a right to something. He had something coming that they had to give him. He thought of Janie’s sudden metamorphosis and he licked his thick lips.
“The girl that was here before me,” he asked eagerly. “Is what happened to her what you call re-editing?”
The little man n
odded.
“And I got a right to the same? I mean, you can make me look the way I’d like to instead of the way I do?”
There was another nod. “But—”
“No buts,” interrupted Blotz rudely. “I want what I got a right to. You get to work on that tape of mine and fix it so I’ll have as much on the ball on the male side as Janie has on the female. And toss in a nice fat bankroll while you’re at it. Me, I like to travel first-class.” He thought for a moment and then held up a restraining hand. “But don’t start tinkering until I give you the word. It ain’t every day that a guy gets a chance to rebuild himself from the ground up, and I want to be sure that I get all the little details just right/’
“But,” continued the Guardian as if the interruption had never occurred, “re-editing in your case wouldn’t have much point. The heart attack you were having just before the key brought you here was a signal, a warning that the tape which has been recording the significant events of your life has just about reached its end. A few minutes after you return, the automatic rewind will cut in and then your spool will be removed from the recorder and sent over to Reward and Punishment for processing.”
Blotz had always considered himself an atheist—more in self-defense than anything else. The thought of a superior something someplace taking personal note of each of his antisocial actions for purposes of future judgment was one that he had never cared to contemplate. He much preferred the feeling of immunity that came with the belief that man is simply an electrochemical machine that returns to its original components when it finally wears out.
But now! The little man’s casual reference to something coming after was disturbing enough to almost override the shock caused by the announcement of his imminent death.
“What’s processing?” he asked uneasily. “What are they going to do to me?”
Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves Page 10
