The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Sixth Series

by Edited by Anthony Boucher

  Mr. Farmer, who had been talking with his mouth full, and smiling happily, suddenly threw down his knife. His face fell.

  “Suppose—d’ye see, gentlemen—suppose a man makes mistakes—eh?—bad ones, very bad, bad, bad. Terrible losses. What? Now, now, oughtn’t he have the chance, the chance, I say, to do better? Better? What, what? Well, so he must see for himself how things go. See for himself. Eh? How things go. Terrible losses. Was it not a thing to break your heart? It broke my heart. I never meant it to happen so-”

  “Gaming!” Wentworth whispered to Mainauduc.

  “To what losses do you refer, Mr. Farmer?” Blee asked, in a solicitous tone. “Did I not understand you to say the harvest was good this year?”

  “The Mesmeric method-” Wentworth began, rather loudly. Abashed, he lowered his voice. “Dr. Mainauduc is desirous of opening in London an institute for the practice of the Mesmeric method of healing. In this, it is contemplated, I am to assist him.” The faintest shadow of color came and went in his face. “What think you of the scheme, gentlemen? We, that is he, should like to know.”

  Blee rose from the table and gave the fire a poke. The gray pyramid collapsed and the coals blazed up again, making the shadows dance. Mr. Farmer laughed.

  “Is not this pleasant?” he cried. “I am so very much obliged to you for the pleasure. Pleasure. We dine simply at home. At home—eh?—we dine very simply. But there is such a degree of stiffness. Strain. Stiffness and strain.”

  Mr. Blee tapped the poker on the iron dogs. “Such an institution, if headed by such a man as Dr. Mainauduc, can not possibly do otherwise than succeed.” The two physicians looked at one another, pleased. Their faces quickened.

  “You will make a deal of money,” Blee told the fire. Wentworth looked hastily at a damed place on his hose, and crossed his legs. “It is the science, not the money. The money is not of any consequence to us.”

  “Not of the least consequence,” Mainauduc said easily. His coat and waistcoat were of French flowered silk. Blee turned from the fire. He drew up his chair and sat, facing Dr. Mainauduc.

  “Gentlemen,” he said in low tones, “pray give me leave to speak openly. The alchymists strove for centuries to make gold; that they succeeded, no one can say with certainty. But magnetism is the new alchymy. It will make gold, I know it. Already London is atremble with the reports of its success. People who would never go so far as Hackney to consult the best physician of the old school ever known, have gone all the way to Bristol to be magnetized by Dr. Mainauduc. You have only to throw open your doors in London, sir, to have your chambers thronged—with the richest . . . and the wealthiest . . .” His voice hissed upon the sibilants. He brought his dark, clever face nearer. “You will need a man of business. May I serve you?”

  The two physicians looked at one another. Dr. Mainauduc’s lips parted. Mr. Wentworth inclined his head to the side. And, then, as abrupt as the bursting of a bubble, the mood or spell was shattered: Mr. Farmer, seemingly from nowhere, had produced a grubby child, and was patting its head and stroking its cheeks and asking what its name was and if it would like a glass of wine—all in a tone of boisterous good cheer, his eyes popping with joy.

  “Now, damme, sir!” cries Blee, jumping to his feet in a rage and overturning the chair. The child begins to weep.

  “Oh, pray, don’t” Farmer implores. “I love children. Don’t fret, poppet.”

  “Take care, Mr. Farmer,” Wentworth warns him. “Do you not see the child is diseased? See the lesions—it is certainly scrofulous. Have done, Mr. Farmer!”

  Then the waiter came, with many apologies, for it was his child, begged their pardon, took the boy away.

  “Well, we shall think of your proposal, Mr. Blee.” Dr. Mainauduc sat back, languid from the food and fire, tired from his journey. “What, Wentworth, was the child with scrofulae?”

  “Assuredly, sir. Shall I call it back? Perhaps you wish to examine, or treat it?” But the Doctor waved his hand. “King’s Evil, is what the common people call it, you know. Scrofula, I mean to say. Some of them profess to regard it as beyond medical aid. They still remember that the monarchs of the former dynasty, as late as Queen Anne, used to ‘touch’ for it. An interesting ceremony it must have been. The touch of an anointed king, the common people say, is the only cure for it. Now what think you, Doctor, of sympathetical mummy, or capons fed with vipers?”

  Dr. Mainauduc, who had been listening with a trace of impatience, cleared his throat. Blee stood once more by the fire.

  “You mentioned, sir, my pamphlet, earlier in the evening— my pamphlet entituled, A Treatise on the Magnetickal Fluid. Whilst I was in Paris I met the eminent American sage, Mr. Franklin, and I presented him a copy, for it seems to me evident that what he calls the positive and negative of electricity is none other than the intension and remission of which that great giant of natural philosophy, Franz Anton Mesmer, writes. Mr. Blee—Mr. Blee?” But that gentleman was staring, his lower lip caught up beneath his teeth, at Mr. Farmer; and Mr. Farmer was weeping.

  “Directly you mentioned Franklin, Doctor, he began to shed tears,” whispered Wentworth. “Do you know, Doctor, I commence to think that he is an American himself—a Loyalist— and that the “loss’ he spoke of was his property—or perhaps his son—in the Rebillion there. What think you, sir?”

  “I commence to think, sir, that he is a man whom I am shortly to magnetize, for it is plain he is in need of it.”

  Dr. Mainauduc rose and blew out all but one of the candles. Wentworth’s eyes glistened and he stepped nearer, but Blee retreated further into the gloom. Only a dull red glow now came from the fire. Dr. Mainauduc seated himself facing Mr. Farmer, touching him knee to knee. He took his hands in his.

  “Attend to me now, sir,” Dr. Mainauduc said.

  “My head does ache,” Mr. Farmer murmured.

  “It shall presently ache no more. . . . Attend.”

  He gently placed Farmer’s hands so they rested, palms up, on his knees, and slowly began to stroke them with the palms of his own hands. He did this for some time, then drew his hands along Mr. Fanner’s arms, leaning forward, until they rested with the fingers touching the neck. Slowly his hands passed up the sides of the man’s face, then withdrew till they were opposite his eyes. Again and again he repeated these passes. The candle’s light glittered on the single ring he wore, and Wentworth saw the glitter reflected in Mr. Farmer’s wide-open eyes. Mr. Farmer was motionless, and the noise of his heavy breathing died away. It seemed to Wentworth, as he watched, that a smoke or vapor, like a thin mist, or the plume from a tobacco-pipe, was exuded from the mesmerist’s face and hands. It moved slowly and sluggishly and hung in the air about Mr. Farmer’s head.

  And as Wentworth watched, he fancied that he saw strange scenes take form for fleeting moments in this miasmic suspiration: a procession of people in heavy robes and men with miters, a phantasm of silent men in violent riot, and noiseless battles on land and sea. Then all vanished, ghosts and mists alike. He heard once more the sound of Mr. Farmer’s breathing, and Dr. Mainauduc had lit the candles and the light was reflected on the paneled walls.

  Wentworth cleared his throat. Mainauduc looked at him, and there was terror in his eyes. He started to speak, and his Voice caught in his throat.

  “We had better leave, you and I,” he said, at last. “Do you know who your country squire is, your Loyalist?”

  “I know,” said Blee’s voice from the door. He stood there, his sallow skin gone paler than Wentworth’s, but a look of determination fixed upon his face. Behind him were two broad-shouldered, shifty-looking men. “We will take charge of Mr. Farmer, if you please.”

  “No, I think not,” Mr. Farmer said. He stood up, an air of dignity upon him. “There has been enough taking charge of Mr. Farmer, and Mr. Fanner has a task to do.”

  “Oh, sir, you are unwell,” Blee said, in a fawning tone, and he sidled forward, followed by his minions. And then, without warning, the room was filled with m
en: constables with their staves in their hands, soldiers in. red coats, Mr. Martinson, the magistrate, a tall young man looking very much like Mr. Farmer himself, and others.

  “You had better come with us, sir, I think,” said the tall young man. Mr. Farmer slumped. The air of dignity fell from him. Then he laughed vacantly.

  “Very well, Fred, very well,” he said. “Very well, very well. You think it best, what, what?” He shambled forward, stopped, looked over his shoulder. “These two gentlemen—” he indicated Dr. Mainauduc and Mr. Wentworth,—”treated me with great consideration. They are not to be bothered, d’ye hear?” The magistrate bowed. Mr. Farmer went out slowly, leaning on the arm of the tall man, and muttering, “Bothered, bothered, bothere…”

  Let us return to the Memoirs.

  “On this occasion [Mainauduc writes] the entire Atmosphere was so saturated with the Magnetickal Fluid that there was cured in another part of the House a Child suffering from a Complaint long-seated and pronounced beyond help, viz., Scrofula, or King’s Evil. There was not a Lesion or Scar or Mark left, and all this without my even having touched him.”

  As to the identity of Mr. Farmer, Dr. Mainauduc is coy. He says only that he was “a Gentleman of exceedingly high Station, exceedingly afflicted. Had I been allowed to treat him further, a Privilege denied me, he might have been spared the terrible Malady which had already begun its Ravages, and which, save for a few brief periods, never entirely left him.”

  Thus far, on this subject, The Memoirs of Dr. Mainauduc, the Mesmerist, a man of his time—or behind his time, if you prefer; or, considering that mesmerism was the forerunner of hypnotism and that the study of hypnotism led Freud on to psychoanalysis, perhaps a man ahead of his time. Could he, perchance—or could anyone—really have cured “Mr. Farmer”? It is impossible to say. If certain private papers of Frederick, Duke of York, still sealed to public inspection, could be opened, we might learn what truth there was—if any—to a curious legend concerning his father. Is it really so that he evaded all who surrounded him, and for six hours one day in early October 1788 wandered unrecognized through London on some strange and unsuccessful quest of his own, in the month when it was finally deemed impossible to doubt any longer that he was mad—that longest-lived and most unfortunate of British Kings, George III?

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  ~ * ~

  FREDERIK POHL

  Frederik Pohl is as good a candidate as you’ll find for the title of the Compleat Science Fictionist. He has been an agent, a magazine editor, an actifan (active fan, for any non-fans in the audience), a writer (in every conceivable length, with at least seven pseudonyms and five collaborators), a book-reviewer, an anthologist ... is there anything the man hasn’t done? Of all his achievements, he is probably most noted for his novels in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth, such as THE SPACE MERCHANTS and GLADIATOR-AT-LAW, which are absolute models of the detailed, plausible creation of an ironically extrapolated future civilization. Now, to confirm his versatility and virtuosity, Mr. Pohl brings off the astonishing feat of a similar creation in under three thousand words, with a complete story and character portrait thrown in. I’m inclined to nominate this, Pohl’s first story in these pages, as one of the most extraordinary jobs of effective conciseness in all of science fiction.

  THE CENSUS TAKERS

  It gets to be a madhouse around here along about the end of the first week. Thank heaven we only do this once a year, that’s what I say! Six weeks on, and forty-six weeks off— that’s pretty good hours, most people think. But they don’t know what those six weeks are like.

  It’s bad enough for the field crews, but when you get to be an Area Boss like me it’s frantic. You work your way up through the ranks, and then they give you a whole C.A. of your own; and you think you’ve got it made. Fifty three-man crews go out, covering the whole Census Area; a hundred and fifty men in the field, and twenty or thirty more in Area Command—and you boss them all. And everything looks great, until Census Period starts and you’ve got to work those hundred and fifty men; and six weeks is too unbearably long to live through, and too impossibly short to get the work done; and you begin living on black coffee and thiamin shots and dreaming about the vacation hostel on Point Loma.

  Anybody can panic, when the pressure is on like that. Your best fieldmen begin to crack up. But you can’t afford to, because you’re the Area Boss. . . .

  Take Witeck. We were Enumerators together, and he was as good a man as you ever saw, absolutely nerveless when it came to processing the Overs. I counted on that man the way I counted on my own right arm; I always bracketed him with the greenest, shakiest new cadet Enumerators, and he never gave me a moment’s trouble for years. Maybe it was too good to last; maybe I should have figured he would crack.

  I set up my Area Command in a plush penthouse apartment. The people who lived there were pretty well off, you know, and they naturally raised the dickens about being shoved out. “Blow it,” I told them. “Get out of here in five minutes, and we’ll count you first.” Well, that took care of that; they were practically kissing my feet on the way out. Of course, it wasn’t strictly by the book, but you have to be a little flexible; that’s why some men become Area Bosses, and others stay Enumerators.

  Like Witeck.

  Along about Day Eight things were really hotting up. I was up to my neck in hurry-ups from Regional Control—we were running a little slow—when Witeck called up. “Chief,” he said, “I’ve got an In.”

  I grabbed the rotary file with one hand and a pencil with the other. “Blue-card number?” I asked.

  Witeck sounded funny over the phone. “Well, Chief,” he said, “he doesn’t have a blue card. He says--”

  “No blue card?” I couldn’t believe it. Come in to a strange C.A. without a card from your own Area Boss, and you’re one In that’s a cinch to be an Over. “What kind of a crazy C.A. does he come from, without a blue card?”

  Witeck said, “He don’t come from any C.A., Chief. He says—”

  “You mean he isn’t from this country?”

  “That’s right, Chief. He-”

  “Hold it!” I pushed away the rotary file and grabbed the immigration roster. There were only a couple of dozen names on it, of course—we have enough trouble with our own Overs, without taking on a lot of foreigners, but still there were a handful every year who managed to get on the quotas. “I.D. number?” I demanded.

  “Well, Chief,” Witeck began, “he doesn’t have an I.D. number. The way it looks to be—”

  Well, you can fool around with these irregulars for a month, if you want to, but it’s no way to get the work done. I said: “Over him!” and hung up. I was a little surprised, though; Witeck knew the ropes, and it wasn’t like him to buck an irregular on to me. In the old days, when we were both starting out, I’d seen him Over a whole family just because the spelling of their names on the registry cards was different from the spelling on the check list.

  But we get older. I made a note to talk to Witeck as soon as the rush was past. We were old friends; I wouldn’t have to threaten him with being Overed himself, or anything like that. He’d know, and maybe that would be all he would need to snap him back. I certainly would talk to him, I promised myself, as soon as the rush was over, or anyway as soon as I got back from Point Loma.

  ~ * ~

  I had to run up to Regional Control to take a little talking-to myself just then, but I proved to them that we were catching up and they were only medium nasty. When I got back Witeck was on the phone again. “Chief,” he said, real unhappy, “this In is giving me a headache. I—”

  “Witeck,” I snapped at him, “are you bothering me with another In? Can’t you handle anything by yourself?”

  He said, “It’s the same one, Chief. He says he’s a kind of ambassador, and—”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, why the devil don’t you get your facts straight in the first place? Give me his name and I’ll check his legation.”

  “Well, Chie
f,” he began again, “he, uh, doesn’t have any legation. He says he’s from the—” he swallowed— “from the middle of the earth.”

  “You’re crazy.” I’d seen it happen before, good men breaking under the strain of census taking. They say in cadets that by the time you process your first five hundred Overs you’ve had it; either you take a voluntary Over yourself, or you split wide open and they carry you off to a giggle farm. And Witeck was past the five hundred mark, way past.

  There was a lot of yelling and crying from the filter center, which I’d put out by the elevators, and it looked like Jumpers. I stabbed the transfer button on the phone and called Carias, my number-two man: “Witeck’s flipped or something. Handle it!”

  And then I forgot about it, while Carias talked to Witeck on the phone; because it was Jumpers, all right, a whole family of them.

  There was a father and a mother and five kids—five of them. Aren’t some people disgusting? The field Enumerator turned them over to the guards—they were moaning and crying—and came up and gave me the story. It was bad.