by William Tenn
"One million," I mused. "So arbitrary. I bet we make—"
"Quite correct. You are an ingenious race. Now if you wouldn't mind stepping back onto your roof? We're in a bit of a hurry, Irngl and I, and we have to disinfect after—Thank you."
I watched them disappear upwards into a cloud bank. Then, noticing a television dipole tied in a hangman's noose which Irngl's father had overlooked, I trudged downstairs.
For a while, I was very angry. Then I was glum. Then I was angry again. I've thought about it a lot since August.
I've read some recent stuff on flying saucers, but not a word about the super-weapon we'll get if we dismantle our hydrogen bombs. But, if someone had blabbed, how would I know about it?
That's just the point. Here I am a writer, a science-fiction writer no less, with a highly salable story that I'm not supposed to use. Well, it happens that I need money badly right now; and it further happens that I am plumb out of plots. How long am I supposed to go on being a sucker?
Somebody's probably told by now. If not in this country, in one of the others. And I am a writer, and I have a living to make. And this is fiction, and who asked you to believe it anyhow?
Only—Only I did intend to leave out the signal. The signal, that is, by which a government can get in touch with the kobolds, can let them know it's interested in making the trade, in getting that weapon. I did intend to leave out the signal.
But I don't have a satisfactory ending to this story. It needs some sort of tag-line. And the signal makes a perfect one. Well—it seems to me that if I've told this much—and probably anyhow—
The signal's the immemorial one between man and kobold: Leave a bowl of milk outside the White House door.
AFTERWORD
I was living next door to Lester del Rey, when I wrote this, in a fifteen-dollar-a-month unheated apartment on West End Avenue in New York City. It had a bathtub in the kitchen and the absolutely boozingest lady superintendent this side of Alcoholics Anonymous. The building was later torn down to become part of the site of today's Lincoln Center. And the apartment was a tiny three-room affair at the end of one of the very longest entrance halls I have ever seen. There was perhaps twice or three times as much square footage in the entrance hall as in the apartment proper.
I used both the apartment and the entrance hallway as the opening scene of "Will You Walk a Little Faster." The title, of course, comes from Lewis Carroll, per the whiting's impatient question to the snail. And the theme...
The theme was the theme of science fiction, five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a time when every newly built house in the suburbs proudly featured a concrete-lined bomb cellar:
Atomic doom.
I had just come back to my apartment after a visit to Lester next door. We had begun a discussion of atomic doom as a mild, rather urbane disagreement and had ended in a screaming, yelling, almost-throwing-things argument.
Lester was a maddening person to argue with. If driven into a corner he would start to Jurgenize; that is, he would start quoting authorities, most of whom he had made up on the spot (I created this verb in honor of Lester, naming it after the most colorful character of the late James Branch Cabell). Randy Garrett, during a similar battle with Lester, made a point of writing down the title of the book Lester was quoting, the name of the author and the publishing house, and even the year, goddammit, of publication—all of which Lester supplied with a noblesse oblige wave of his hand. These Randy then checked, not only with the New York Public Library, but also eventually with the Library of Congress itself.
He confronted Lester with the result in the presence of four other science-fiction writers. "No such book," he said triumphantly. "No record of its ever being published. No record at all, at all, at all."
Lester looked amused. He shrugged. "It's a shame about the Library of Congress," he said. "Such a shabby excuse for what it's supposed to be. So ridiculously incomplete in every important way. No, you really have to learn to use the Bodleian in Oxford for any important research. The last time I checked, they had two copies, one of them in pretty good condition."
Randy positively danced with fury and frustration. He put his left fist in his mouth and bit hard on it.
He swore he would make it a goal of his life to go to Oxford before he died, and to visit the Bodleian. Unfortunately, he later had a stroke and never did.
My argument with Lester on the subject of atomic doom had begun with Lester asking me if I was one of those people who ran around shivering and shaking about the mere existence of nuclear weapons. When I told him I was—that I both shivered and shook—he smiled and, in his best Campbellian manner, pointed out to me how unlikely it would be for anyone with the merest soupcon of a sense of self-preservation to use such a weapon no matter what the provocation. Who would take the chance of doing something that might well end up destroying the planet? After all, people who governed countries had gotten to where they were because of outstanding intelligence.
"Really?" I said. "Then how about Hitler in that last bunker in Berlin, with the Russians smashing their way to where he lay hidden? If a subordinate had come to him and told him of the development of a weapon that could vaporize the oncoming Russian armies but might also just possibly destroy the entire world, what do you think he would have said?"
Lester rebutted immediately with a previously unheard-of biography of Hitler that practically said in so many words Der Führer would have done no such thing. He added concurring opinions by two French lieutenant generals my extensive reading had failed to mention, and wound up by quoting a former associate head of the atomic energy program whose name and title I knew he had just made up out of the thinnest of air.
At this point I'm afraid I began yelling. Lester yelled back. We continued at a very high pitch until the frequently drunken woman who was the building's resident landlady was attracted by the uproar and walked in through the open doorway to ask us if we possibly had any part of a quart of Scotch that she could borrow.
I left, still yelling over my shoulder. And the moment I opened the door of my apartment and began walking up that long entrance hall, what the French call l'esprit d'escalier (l'esprit du vestibule?) came upon me and I thought of what I might have said. And, as I did, I looked about me and realized just how I might dramatize all that I could have and should have said.
Then I went into the apartment proper and sat down at my Remington typewriter and wrote out the dramatization. Because after all, an argument is an argument, but I needed the money to pay the landlady my overdue rent.
Written 1950——Published 1951
THE HOUSE DUTIFUL
To—to be... an unformable, lonely thought groped blindly for a potential fact... need, a need... it was—something... it was—needed... it was needed? Consciousness!
A living creature came with the pride of ownership, the triggering wistfulness for it. Unlike its first darling, this creature had notions that were bizarre and primitive, conceptually agonizing. Painful, painful, painful they were to organize into. But it had purpose again—and, more, it had desire—
Thoughtlessly, lovingly, the immense thing began to flow to the fixed-upon place, twitching awkward experimental shapes upward as it went.
—|—
The back-country Canadian road was obscure even for the biting concentration of the deluxe Caterpillar runabout. Metal treads apologized shrilly as they hit a rock that was too large and too snugly embedded in the mud. The bright yellow car canted steeply to the right and came down level again with a murky splash.
"And I was so happy in the dairy," Esther Sakarian moaned in histrionic recollection as she dug her unpainted, thoroughly trimmed fingernails into the lavender upholstery of the front seat. "I had my own quiet little lab, my neatly labeled samples of milk and cheese from the day's production; at night I could walk home on cement sidewalks or drop into a dry, air-conditioned restaurant or movie. But Philadelphia wasn't good enough for me! No, I had to—"
"Ba
d storms last night, smooth riding, usually," Paul Marquis muttered on her left. He grimaced his glasses back into correct nose position and concentrated on the difficult visual task of separating possible road from possible marsh.
"I had to come up to the Great Bear Lake where every prospector sneezes and all the men are vile. Adventure I wanted—hah! Well, here I am, using up the last of my girlhood. I spend my days purifying water for a bunch of whisky-soaked nuclear physicists. Every night I ask God: Is this by you adventure?"
Marquis sloughed the runabout around a dwarfed red spruce that grew belligerently in the middle of the damp highway. "Should be there in a minute or two, Es. Forty of the sweetest acres that anybody ever talked the Canadian government into selling. And a little bumpy hill just off the road that's a natural foundation for the Cape Cod cottage Caroline's always talking about."
The bacteriologist prodded his shoulder tenderly. "Talking about it in Boston and building it in northern Canada—a little different, don't you think? You haven't married the gal yet."
"You don't know Caroline," Marquis told her confidently. "Besides, we'll be only forty miles from Little Fermi—and the town will grow. The lode we're working on seems to be about ten times as rich as the Eldorado mine over at Port Radium. If it holds up, we'll build a uranium pile that will be a power plant for the entire western hemisphere. Business will get interested, real estate values will boom—"
"So it's a good investment, too? Sheer mysticism, like your opinion that a lifetime spent behind Beacon Street walls makes the housemaid-and-mistress combo you want in a wife."
"Now you sound like that mad medico Connor Kuntz when I beat his classic Capablancan chess with an inspirational heresy. There's a nineteenth-century mechanist you could be happy with; all he wants is a mate of good disposition and fair heredity who will be absorbed in her work and let him do his bone-setting in peace. I don't want a mate—I want a marriage. No servant any employment agency ever—"
"Dr. Kuntz is a mass of greasy rationalization. And I wasn't proposing to you by indirection."
"—ever sent out," he went on doggedly, "could handle the menial essentials of domestic living with the affection and grace of a wife. Machines are no substitute; you don't get omnipresent, understanding love from a machine. Not that I'm marrying Caroline just to get someone who'll kiss me while she's preparing dinners I like—"
"Of course not! It's comfortable, though, to know you'll get it just the same. Which you wouldn't if you married, say... oh, say a female bacteriologist who had work of her own to do and would be as tired as you at the end of the day. Up with the double standard; but keep it intellectual!"
The excessively thin young man slapped the car to a stop and turned with his mouth open for a blast. Esther Sakarian was one of those tidy, docile-appearing women whose remarks generated a surprising amount of factional heat in men.
"Look here, Es," he began loudly, "social development and the relatively new integrity of the individual to one side, people still consist of men and women. Women—with the exception of maladjusted—"
"Hey, there!" Esther was staring over his shoulder with her nostrils flaring respectfully. "You've done quite a job! It doesn't look a bit prefabricated, Paul. But it must have been expensive getting priorities for those sections on the Diesel snow trains. And you banged it together in one week by yourself? Quite a job!"
"I would appreciate it if you stopped raving and told me—"
"Your house... your Cape Cod cottage! It's perfect."
"My what?" Paul Marquis spun around.
Esther slid the right-hand door back into its slot and stepped delicately onto the mud. "I'll bet you have it half furnished, too. And full of the crazy domestic gimmicks you're always working out. Downy old duck, aren't you? 'Come on, Es, I want to ask your advice on where to stick a house on that land I bought!' So go on and smirk: don't worry, I won't have the gall to say I knew it all the time."
Marquis watched the progress of her feminized blue jeans up the bush-infested hill toward the green and white cottage with anything but a smirk.
Finally, he swung madly over the side, slipped headlong into the mud, picked himself up and clambered on, dripping great brown chunks of Canadian soil as he thudded up the slope.
Esther nodded at him as he approached, her hand truculent on the long, old-fashioned doorknob. "What's the sense of locking doors in this wilderness? If anyone were going to burglarize, they could smash a window quite easily and help themselves while you were away. Well, don't stand there looking philosophical—make with the key, make with the key!"
"The... the key." Dazed, he took a small key chain out of his pocket, looked at it for a moment, then shoved it back violently. He ran a hand through a tangle of blond hair and leaned against the door. It opened.
The bacteriologist trotted past him as he clawed at the post to retain his balance. "Never could get the hang of those prehistoric gadgets. Photoelectric cells will be good enough for my children, and they're good enough for me. Oh, Paul! Don't tell me your sense for the fitness of things extends no further than atomic nuclei. Look at that furniture!"
"Furniture?" he asked very weakly. Slowly, he opened eyes which had been tightly closed while he leaned against the door. He took in the roomful of chairs and tables done in the sprouting-from-one-center-leg style which was currently popular. "Furniture!" he sighed and carefully closed his eyes again.
Esther Sakarian shook her sober head with assurance. "New Single-Support just doesn't go in a Cape Cod cottage. Believe me, Paul, your poetic soul may want to placate your scientific mind by giving it superfunctional surroundings, but you can't do it in this kind of a house. Furthermore, just by looking at that retouched picture of Caroline you have pasted to your Geiger counter, I know she wouldn't approve. You'll have to get rid of at least—"
He had come up to her side and stood plucking the sleeve of her bright plaid shirt. "Esther," he muttered, "my dear, sweet, talkative, analytical, self-confident Esther—please sit down and shut up!"
She dropped into a roundly curved seat, staring at him from angled eyebrows. "You have a point to make?"
"I have a point to make!" Paul told her emphatically. He waved wildly at the modern furniture which seemed to be talking slang in the pleasant, leisurely room. "All this, the house, the furniture, the accessories, was not only not built nor sent here by me, but... but wasn't here a week ago when I came out with the man from the land office and bought the property. It shouldn't be here!"
"Nonsense! It couldn't just—" She broke off.
He nodded. "It did just. But that only makes me feel crazy. What makes me positively impatient for a jacket laced securely up the back is the furniture. It's the kind of furniture I thought of whenever Caroline talked about building this cottage. But the point is this: I knew she wanted to stuff it full of New England antique, and—since I feel a woman's place is in the home—I never argued the point. I never mentioned buying Single-Support to her; I've never mentioned the idea to anyone. And every chair and table in this room is exactly what I thought it should be—privately!"
Esther had been listening to him with an expanding frown. Now she started an uneasy giggle, and cut it off before it began to throb. "Paul, I know you're too neurotic to be insane, and I'm willing to admit my leg isn't pretty enough for you to pull. But this... this—Look, the house may have been dropped by a passing plane; or possibly Charles Fort had the right idea. What you're trying to tell me about the furniture, though—It makes for belly butterflies!"
"Mine have electric fans on their wings," he assured her. "Now let's try to stay calm. Let's hold hands and go into the kitchen. If there's a certain refrigerator-sink-stove combination—"
There was. Paul Marquis gripped the sleek enamel and whistled "The Pilgrim's Chorus" through his teeth.
"I will a-ask you to c-consider this f-fact," he said at last, shakenly. "This particular rig is one which I worked out on the back of an envelope from Caroline at three-fifteen ye
sterday when the big dredge got kinked up and I had nothing else to do. Prior to that time, all I knew was that I wanted something slightly different in the way of an all-in-one kitchen unit. This is what I drew."
Esther patted the sides of her face as if she were trying to slap herself back into sanity ever so gently. "Yes, I know."
"You do?"
"You may not remember, Mr. Marquis, but you showed me the drawing in the mess hall at supper. Since it was too fantastically expensive to be considered seriously, I suggested shaping the refrigerator like a sphere so that it would fit into the curve of the stove. You chucked out your lower lip and agreed. The refrigerator is shaped like a sphere and fits into the curve of the stove."
Paul opened a cupboard and pulled out a rainbow-splashed tumbler. "I'm going to get a drink, even if it's water!"
He held the tumbler under the projecting faucet and reached for a button marked "cold." Before his questing finger pressed it, however, a stream of ice-cold fluid spurted out of the faucet, filled the glass and stopped without a trickle.
The physicist exhaled at the completely dry bottom surface of the sink. He tightened his fingers convulsively on the tumbler and poured its contents down his throat. A moment passed, while his head was thrown back; then Esther, who had been leaning against the smooth wall, saw him begin to gag. She reached his side just as the coughs died away and the tears started to leak out of his eyes.
"Whoo-oof?" he explained. "That was whisky—the finest Scotch ever to pass these tired old lips. Just as it started to pour, I thought to myself: 'What you need, friend, is a good swift slug of Scotch.' And Esther—that's what that water was! Talk about miracles!"
