On the surface of the Bay to his right a legless veteran propelled himself out onto the water aboard a raft, rowing himself toward a pile of debris that was undoubtedly a sunken ship. On the hulk a number of fishing lines could be seen; they belonged to the veteran and he was in the process of checking them. Watching the raft go, Stuart wondered if it could reach the San Francisco side. He could offer the man fifty cents for a one-way trip; why not? Stuart got out of his car and walked to the edge of the pier.
“Hey,” he yelled, “come here.” From his pocket he got a penny; he tossed it down onto the pier and the veteran saw it, heard it. At once he spun the raft about and came paddling rapidly back, straining to make speed, his face streaked with perspiration. He grinned up friendlily at Stuart, cupping his ear.
“Fish?” he called. “I don’t have any yet today, but maybe later on how about a small shark? Guaranteed safe.” He held up the battered Geiger counter which he had connected to his waist by a length of rope—in case it fell from the raft or someone tried to steal it, Stuart realized.
“No,” Stuart said, squatting down at the edge of the pier. “I want to get over to San Francisco; I’ll pay you a quarter for one way.”
“But I got to leave my lines to do that,” the veteran said, his smile fading. “I got to collect them all or somebody’d steal them while I was gone.”
“Thirty-five cents,” Stuart said.
In the end they agreed, at a price of forty cents. Stuart locked the legs of Edward Prince of Wales together so no one could steal him, and presently he was out on the Bay, bobbing up and down aboard the veteran’s raft, being rowed across to San Francisco.
“What field are you in?” the veteran asked him. “You’re not a tax collector, are you?” He eyed him calmly.
“Naw,” Stuart said. “I’m a small trap man.”
“Listen, my friend,” the veteran said, “I got a pet rat lives under the pilings with me? He’s smart; he can play the flute. I’m not putting you under an illusion, it’s true. I made a little wooden flute and he plays it, through his nose… it’s practically an Asiatic nose-flute like they have in India. Well, I did have him, but the other day he got run over. I saw the whole thing happen; I couldn’t go get him or nothing. He ran across the pier to get something, maybe a piece of cloth… he has this bed I made him but he gets—I mean he got—cold all the time because they mutated, this particular line, they lost their hair.”
“I’ve seen those,” Stuart said, thinking how well the hairless brown rat evaded even Mr. Hardy’s electronic vermin traps. “Actually I believe what you said,” he said. “I know rats pretty well. But they’re nothing compared to those little striped gray-brown tabby cats… I’ll bet you had to make the flute, he couldn’t construct it himself.”
“True,” the veteran said. “But he was an artist. You ought to have heard him play; I used to get a crowd at night, after we were finished with the fishing. I tried to teach him the Bach ‘Chaconne in D.’ ”
“I caught one of those tabby cats once,” Stuart said, “that I kept for a month until it escaped. It could make little sharp-pointed things out of tin can lids. It bent them or something; I never did see how it did it, but they were wicked.”
The veteran, rowing, said, “What’s it like south of San Francisco these days? I can’t come up on land.” He indicated the lower part of his body. “I stay on the raft. There’s a little trap door, when I have to go to the bathroom. What I need is to find a dead phoce sometime and get his cart. They call them phocomobiles.”
“I knew the first phoce,” Stuart said, “before the war. He was brilliant; he could repair anything.” He lit up an imitation-tobacco cigarette; the veteran gaped at it longingly. “South of San Francisco it’s as you know all flat. So it got hit bad and it’s just farmland now. Nobody ever rebuilt there, and it was mostly those little tract houses so they left hardly any decent basements. They grow peas and corn and beans down there. What I’m going to see is a big rocket a farmer just found; I need relays and tubes and other electronic gear for Mr. Hardy’s traps.” He paused. “You ought to have a Hardy trap.”
“Why? I live on fish, and why should I hate rats? I like them.”
“I like them, too,” Stuart said, “but you have to be practical; you have to look to the future. Someday America may be taken over by rats if we aren’t wary. We owe it to our country to catch and kill rats, especially the wiser ones that would be natural leaders.”
The veteran glared at him. “Sales talk, that’s all.”
“I’m sincere.”
“That’s what I have against salesmen; they believe their own lies. You know that the best rats can ever do, in a million years of evolution, is maybe be useful as servants to we human beings. They could carry messages maybe and do a little manual work. But dangerous—” He shook his head. “How much does one of your traps sell for?”
“Ten dollars silver. No State boodle accepted; Mr. Hardy is an old man and you know how old people are, he doesn’t consider boodle to be real money.” Stuart laughed.
“Let me tell you about a rat I once saw that did a heroic deed,” the veteran began, but Stuart cut him off.
“I have my own opinions,” Stuart said. “There’s no use arguing about it.” They were both silent, then. Stuart enjoyed the sight of the Bay on all sides; the veteran rowed. It was a nice day, and as they bobbed along toward San Francisco, Stuart thought of the electronic parts he might be bringing back to Mr. Hardy and the factory on San Pablo Avenue, near the ruins of what had once been the west end of the University of California.
“What kind of cigarette is that?” the veteran asked presently.
“This?” Stuart examined the butt; he was almost ready to put it out and stick it away in the metal box in his pocket. The box was full of butts, which would be opened and made into new cigarettes by Tom Grandi, the local cigarette man in South Berkeley. “This,” he said, “is imported. From Marin County. It’s a deluxe Gold Label made by—” He paused for effect. “I guess I don’t have to tell you.”
“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. And 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 t
he 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.
The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories Page 11
