by Sladek, John
Night fell.
We have the green car, so it must be that blue cap we are now after, said one of the police men. If we can only get to the train station in time, we can stop that girl, before she gets another man or woman.
You talk like a man who eats fish cake, said another. It is the green cap we want, and it is at the bus station. The cap is upon a boy, one who got it at the fire station. Here, you can not run this car well. Let me have a go at it.
Let go! Look out! That dog! That bus!
There is my car, said Bill. He ran into the street. Look out for the bus! said the big, round man.
Two queens sat just back of Ann on the bus. Did we run over a rabbit dear? asked the one called Dot.
That is his bag, said the other, who had the name Clara. Tell me, sweets, can I keep this green cap?
That old thing? Blue is it not? Yes, do keep it. I found it today under a tree. By the station. It is just right for your head, you know?
THE HAMMER OF EVIL
OR
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES AT THE PASCAL BUSINESS SCHOOL
Through the barred window, a blue Magritte sky. I’ve told them, I’m as innocent as any angel that ever danced on the head of any pin. They can’t keep me.
‘Getting out of here?’ Professor Rice grins. ‘Nothing easier. I can leave anytime I like.’
‘I know, I know. It’s all how you look at it. Professor, if you’ve said that once, you must have said it a thousand ti–’
The meter in the wall clicks, and a printed card slips out. It reads: Surely you mean that, if he has said it a thousand times, he must have said it once. Otherwise explain.
They, the Acamarians, are pretty hot on explanations. I throw the card on the heap in the corner. Some lucky prisoner has the makings of a card house. Not me, I’m ready for execution. When I tell them I have nothing to lose, they ask me to explain.
‘If I close my eyes, the world goes. (All but the smell of my unwashed cellmate.) You can’t kill me, or I’ll take the world with me. You can destroy my soul, but my body will go marching on.’ That usually impresses them, especially when I march around the cell with my eyes shut.
When that fails, I can always tell them that past and future are all the same to me.
The cell door clangs open theatrically. A new man is thrown in. I am wary, for two reasons: (a) His ugliness. The yellow teeth, blackheads in ears, greased-down black hair with white dandruff, fat neck with boils – could he be an agent, trying for sympathy? (b) Anyway, he smells. Could be a way of breaking me down. They don’t know the secret resources of Yuri Trumbull, though.
‘Hello. They got you, too?’
I nod. Nods are safe, they give them information only one bit at a time. An old trick I learned from an Apache programmer. Trumbull is wily. My companion offers his hand. Scabs.
‘Don’t you know me?’ he says. ‘I know I’m not at my best, but –’
‘Professor Rice!’ I haven’t seen him for, what, fifteen years. Professor Rice, of the good old Pascal Business School. ‘What a coincidence!’ More of their work, I’m thinking. But I know all about coincidences. I’m an actuary. Professor Rice is an antiquary. The Acamarians caught him in the Antarctic, digging up – why am I telling all these silly lies?
‘So they got you, too,’ he says again. ‘My star pupil.’ He sits on his bunk, marking territory with a noisy fart. ‘Where was it?’
I begin inventing the past, as it really was. ‘At work. I had just calculated the life expectancies for a Mormon waiter whose mother owns her own rhubarb, and a bricklayer who races his catamaran. The Mormon lives longer.’
‘Fascinating. How much longer?’
Yuri Trumbull isn’t saying. Wouldn’t they just like to get their tentacles (or claws or whatever they have) on that vital piece of inside information!
‘I finished, and my pocket calculator read 808327338. Bob Deal, at the next desk, started rambling on about probabilities. “I’ve got six reports here,” he said, “from different places. Six people who took out life insurance, effective midnight, June the sixth. One minute later, each of them was killed by lightning. Incredible.”
‘“I believe it,” I said.
‘Bob has a short temper, it has something to do with his wooden neck. “Listen, it’s about as likely as all the air in this room rushing over to one side and leaving a vacuum. Not impossible, but not bloody likely, either. There’s devilry in it.”
‘I looked at my pocket calculator upside down. It read BEELZEBOB. “Hey Bob, here’s a funny coincidence for you!”
‘He didn’t answer. All the air had rushed away from his part of the room, leaving a vacuum. Well, I took the hint. Ever since, I’ve been a devout –’
‘Mormon?’
‘No, bricklayer. It’s the sincerest form of prayer, according to my wife.’
Professor Rice blew his nose and looked at his handkerchief thoughtfully, like a customer at the hors d’oeuvres table. ‘I didn’t know you were married.’
‘My prayers have not been answered, no. But who knows? A few more bricks … As he suffocated, Bob wrote down the combination to the wall safe on his blotter. I opened the wall safe and looked through it to a blue Magritte sky. Blue, I tell you!’
He offered me a sandwich. Staring at his black fingernails, I declined.
‘Taking a light carbine from the office wall, I crawled into the safe and on through. Magritte country, all right. A lot of men in bowler hats standing around, striking poses. I could fairly smell the green apples. This could only be London. The wind was from the south-southeast at a steady –’
‘Get to the telegram part,’ he said, spitting crumbs.
How did he know about that? Was he inventing my past?
‘It was handed to me from a train window. It said, A CRUST OF-BREAD IS BETTER THAN NOTHING. NOTHING IS BETTER THAN HEAVEN. So it was you who sent it?’
‘I couldn’t leave the train,’ he protested. ‘I was investigating a murder – or its opposite, really.’
I’ll work that into my past somehow. I’m in the driver’s seat again.
I first knew Professor Rice as a brisk, white-toothed young teacher, leading the Statistical Anomaly seminar. Very advanced stuff, for kids who only wanted to sell insurance.
‘Trumbull, let’s have that paper on the Prisoner’s Dilemma.’
Game theory. Two men are captured by the enemy, and questioned separately. If, say, A confesses, and B doesn’t, A will be freed, given a huge reward and treated as a hero. B will be shot. If both men confess, they’ll serve life sentences at hard labour. If both keep their mouths shut, they’ll be released. What should B do?
We have been questioned separately, the Professor and I. What did he tell them? That I was his star pupil? Or that he found the conclusions of my paper invalid?
‘Professor Rice, have you actually seen them face-to-face?’
‘Of course not, my boy.’ The patronizing tone. ‘No one has actually seen the Acamarians. That’s partly how they keep their power. Talk about culture shock! Frankly, this invasion is getting on my nerves. No, we have to take their existence on faith. Oh, did I tell you I’m writing a novel about God?’
Years after our seminar, I met him on a tube train. He crosses London every day, to an office in the financial district. There he works on his long-awaited novel. Even then, I could see the signs of deterioration: The nap coming off his bowler, glasses taped together at the temple. He held a clipboard, and seemed to be counting the passengers. I invent the conversation:
‘Hello, Professor. What’s this?’
‘Working over a theory, Trumbull. Counting the number of people who get on and off. At every station, more people get off the train than on. Curious, eh?’
‘Every station? That’s impossible.’
He made a face. ‘Please. Never use that word. There are two perfectly plausible explanations. (a) People are being generated right inside this carriage, somehow. (b) The word “more” doesn’t mean what i
t used to mean.’
I counted the passengers at the next station.
‘Your theory’s wrong. I just saw three people get into this carriage, and only one got out.’
‘You didn’t see the others, then? That is fascinating.’
Fascinating, his favourite word. He hisses it, sticking out the yellow lower teeth. He is fascinated by paradoxes, and by found bits of his own excessive body dirt.
A sad decline: Shiny bowler and hallucinations.
He yawns, exposing food, exhaling the smell of death. What could be more unlikely, in any universe, than being locked into a cell with this living corpse? Otherwise, it wouldn’t be so bad: smooth grey stone walls, wooden bunks, not bad. The food could improve, especially the pollo soppresso. Rice prefers his packed lunches (where does he get them?), thin tomato-margarine sandwiches, he bites the dry crusts better than heaven, he throws the scraps on the floor.
‘Do they let you smoke here?’ He rolls a dirty little rag of a cigarette. ‘Go on. You saw men in bowlers …’
‘They rushed me, brandishing their umbrellas. How was I to know they were making for a train? I opened fire.’
‘But it didn’t work?’
‘I see you know this country well, Professor. In order to reach the heart of a businessman dressed as Kafka, the bullet must first get halfway to him. Then it must go half the remaining distance, and so on, an infinite number of smaller and smaller steps. It’s all too much for the bullet, so it gives up. Motion is impossible.’
‘All things are possible with God,’ he counters.
The next card asks him to elaborate.
‘God can do anything. He could even cure poor old Zeno’s dreams of impotence. I refer to Zeno the Greek philosopher, and not to Zeno the highly literate English prisoner.’
He received a THANK YOU card, the first I’ve seen.
‘The bullet fell from the end of the gun and rolled around on the platform. One of the commuters tripped and fell down on it, and it lodged in his heart. So I’m here for a murder I didn’t commit.’
‘A likely story,’ says Rice. He means it; his very boils are bursting with approbation. ‘My own case is similar. I’m an antiquary, as you know. While digging in the Antarctic, I happened to find two rare old bronze coins. A Greek piece marked “51 B.C.”, and a British coin marked “George I”. These have proved fraudulent, and they say I planted them myself.
‘They produced three witnesses who swear they saw me do it. I offered to produce thirty who would swear they didn’t see me do it, but there: The guilty are always caught, you know.’
A card asks for explanation.
‘If a man is guilty, he is always caught for his crimes. Another way of saying the same thing is, if a man is not caught, he’s not guilty. We have only to look around and find a man who’s never been caught. Is he innocent? Of course he is. There are millions of uncaught innocent men. Samuel Butler, to name but three.
‘So I was caught.’ He drops the ragged cigarette and digs a finger in his ear. ‘The interrogation was odd. They asked me all about an old problem from the seminar.’
I’m not listening. Bread is better than heaven, is it? The lazy loaves drift quietly across our sky. Really they’re Acamarian spacecraft, I suppose, powered by sheer nerve. Our nerve is gone, we’re the suppressed chickens. I want out. I want the clean smell of fresh deodorant again. Is it true that, merely by using spray deodorants, humanity destroyed the Earth’s ozone layer? And did that open the way to our invaders? I must look it all up in the prison library. Before dawn, and the firing squad.
‘A prisoner is told by the governor that he’ll be hanged one day in the coming week, but not on any day he’s expecting it.’ He’s rambling again. ‘Now he knows he can’t be executed on Saturday. If they haven’t killed him on any of the other six days, they can’t kill him on the seventh, when he’ll certainly be expecting it. So Saturday is out.’
Why do so many paradoxes involve prisoners and hanging?
‘By the same reasoning, Friday is out. Since it has to be one of the six days, it can’t be the sixth, because he must expect it by then. Friday is out, Thursday is out, and so on. He eliminates each day until he’s left with only Sunday. But they can’t hang him then, either, because he now expects it. So they can’t hang him at all.’
The Acamarians aren’t too bright. They really don’t see the rest of it. Our prisoner reasons that they can’t hang him on any day of the week, so he’s never expecting it. So they can hang him anytime.
‘They want answers,’ says my cell-mate. ‘Tell them nothing.’
The interrogation room is like the first-class compartment of a luxury flight. You scrunch down in your comfortable seat with your earphones. If they like your answers, they show you movies. I’ve seen both of their excellent, all-family selections: Keys of the Kingdom (Gregory Peck meets God) and My Friend Flicka (Roddy MacDowall meets horse).
Under intensive interrogation, and bribed with chicken and butter, I tell them about prisoners A, B and C.
‘The governor tells them that two will hang, and one will be set free. A says to the governor, “Tell me the name of one of the other men who will hang. If both of them are going to be hanged, just tell me either name.”
‘The governor says, “B will hang.”
‘A now sees that his survival chances have increased. Earlier, he had one chance in three of surviving. Now, either C or himself will go free, so his chances are one in two.
‘“Wait,” says the governor. “Suppose I said C instead of B?”
‘“My chances would still improve in the same way.”
‘“Suppose I said nothing at all, then.”
‘“It’s still the same. You’d be suppressing one name or the other, and, no matter which, my chances would still be one in two.”’
This baffles them. They can’t see why the governor is in the story at all. A could simply imagine a governor coming to him and speaking a name. So A’s chances of survival are always one in two?
‘That’s right,’ I lie. Why do I enjoy lying to them? They’re doing their best.
I finally ask Professor Rice to put his escape plan into action.
‘All right. Look at the corner of the cell. There, see where the ceiling and floor corners are? Now, why do they have to be inside corners? Couldn’t they just possibly be the outside corners of a crooked cube?’
I stare at them until they are. We jump back, avoiding the big lopsided cube as it falls over. We’re free.
Two other freed prisoners rush over to thank him. They even shake his hand.
‘I’m A,’ says the taller. ‘This is my cell-mate, B. I’m afraid C was crushed beneath a big stone block. Good thing his insurance coverage started a few minutes ago.’
The four of us get on a train (and five get off). Professor Rice finds his clipboard on the floor and makes a note.
I feel I’ve heard A’s story before: ‘B and I are related. We hang around together, doing odd jobs. You know, chopping wood, pumping water in and out of tanks. Or racing. We race a lot. Rowboats, upstream and downstream, stuff like that. Good clean fun.’
What is it I like about A so much?
‘Fun!’ B has the shoulder slump of a born loser. ‘Like if I ride a bike from X to Y, A has to race me in a car, passing me at –’
‘That’s not fair,’ A says. ‘You generally have twice as many apples as I do, before you give me half the –’
‘Give, give, give! It’s been the same ever since you were as many years old as I am younger than you were when –’
‘Ignore him.’ A turns to me. ‘It all goes back to our parents, a lawyer and a model. They met at a footrace. The lawyer could go faster uphill and on the level, but mother was faster on the downhill parts. So naturally mother won.’
Professor Rice does not look up from his work. ‘I take it you mean the lawyer was your mother.’
B, still sulking, says, ‘A’s not my brother, you know.’
I
feel it’s true.
‘It’s true!’ Professor Rice is fascinated. ‘I calculate the number of passengers generated within this carriage as exactly – uh, I have the figures here – exactly one.’
I hate to say it. ‘Professor, have you counted yourself?’
He adjusts his taped glasses, turns over the pages on his clipboard for a moment or two. Finally he says:
‘Have I told you about my novel?’
The train wheels begin to scream. I know what’s happened: The tracks are getting narrower as we near the horizon.
I get off alone at the next station. (No one gets in.) Along the deserted platform, I hear voices from the exit tunnels. Going alone through the tunnel, I hear feet and voices on the escalators.
No one is on the escalators. No one in the ticket-collector’s box, where I find his burning cigarette on the shelf. Outside there are traffic noises, murmuring mobs of shoppers, the cry of a newspaper man. But of course when I get there, it’s to see: abandoned cars; a stack of papers peeling off and blowing away; an ice-cream cone on the pavement, just starting to melt. London, perhaps the world, is one big Mary Celeste, with everyone suddenly out to lunch.
Professor Rice’s office is here, in a blue glass tower where brokers and lawyers, on a normal day, might sit and reason with one another.
All I can find of his novel is in the typewriter:
‘If I’m God,’ said God, who was, ‘then why can’t I do anything I like? Why can’t I lock myself in a prison from which even I can’t escape?’
He found this, like all questions, rhetorical.
‘I know the answer to that one,’ he cried, paring his fingernails. ‘The answer is, even I can’t contradict myself. Ha!’
Ha indeed. One crummy idea, in a half-dozen lines, and that cribbed from Aquinas. Nor any explanation of the fingernails. (Can the Infinite grow?) Why can’t God contradict himself, anyway?
I look out over the blue city. At any moment, the alien invasion could begin. For centuries, the hordes of Acamar have been on the way: Levering themselves slowly through space; hand-over-hand (if they have hands) along weightless ropes, through frictionless pulleys, dragged along by perpetual motion …
