Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II

by William Tenn

  It was about time for me to break into the conversation. Between Ernest and the old lady, it sounded like a duet with fife and piccolo. Such voices!

  "Just stay unstabled a second," I said. "Where do I come into all this?"

  She turned hostile eyes to me. "I'm afraid you don't. We are removing it from you. The various items you have received from our time... you should never have gone so far, Ernest... will also be removed."

  "I don't see it that way." I reached out and grabbed Ernest. He struggled, he had muscles in the strangest places; but I had no trouble holding on to him. I lifted the bough threateningly over his head.

  "If you don't do just as I tell you, I'll hurt the boy. I'll—I'll skinge all over him!" Then I had an inspiration. "I'll demobilize him! I'll fragisticate every last bone in his body."

  "Just what do you want?" she asked very quietly in that thin voice.

  "That trendicle you have. The one without keys."

  "I'll be back shortly." She turned with a tinkle of the green dress and faded back into the chrondromos. Just like that.

  One of the neatest deals I'd ever swung. Just like that! And guys work for a living.

  Ernest writhed and twisted and shuddered, but I held him. I wasn't letting him go, no sir! He represented millions of dollars.

  The blue haze shimmered again and the old lady stepped out. She carried a circular black thing with a handle in the center.

  "Now, that's more like—" I started to say as she pulled the handle.

  And that was all. I couldn't move. I couldn't even wiggle the hairs in my nose. I felt like my own tombstone.

  The kid darted away. He picked up the small trendicle where I'd dropped it on the grass and ran to the old lady. She reached up with her free hand. She was speaking to him:

  "A definite pattern, Ernest. Selfishness, cruelty, little wisdom. Avarice without the faintest signs of a social—" Her hand came down and the blue haze disappeared. I bounded forward, but there was empty air behind the rock. As if they'd never been there.

  Not quite.

  The can of paint still sat on the ground where I'd parked it. I chuckled and reached for it. There was a sudden flicker of blue.

  The can disappeared. A musical voice said, "Ooops. Sorry!"

  I whirled. Nobody there. But the can was gone.

  For the next half hour, I almost went crazy. All that stuff I could have had. All the questions I could have asked and didn't. All the information—money-making information—I had missed.

  Information. Then I remembered. Wenceslaus. The kid had said someone named Wenceslaus had invented the spirillix about this time; had a lot of trouble financing it. I don't know what it is: maybe it stuffs ballot boxes; maybe it enables you to scratch your left elbow with your left hand. But whatever it is, I made up my mind right then, I'm going to find it and sink every penny I have into it. All I know about it is that it's some sort of gimmick; it does things—and it does them good.

  I got back to my office and began hiring detectives. You see, I'd already figured that it wouldn't be enough to check phone listings—my Wenceslaus of the spirillix might not have a phone. He might not even call the gadget a spirillix; that could be the name Ernest's people fastened on it.

  Well, I didn't go into detail with the detectives. I just told them to find me people named Wenceslaus or close to it, anywhere in the country. I interview them myself. I have to tell them the whole story, so they'll get the feel of the thing, so they'll be able to recognize the spirillix if they've invented it.

  That's where you come in, Mr. Wantzilotz. Anyone with a name so close can't be missed. Maybe I didn't hear Ernest right; maybe the name was changed, later.

  Now you've heard the story. Think, Mr. Wantzilotz. Are you working on anything besides raising chickens? Are you inventing anything, improving on anything—

  No, I don't think a homemade mousetrap is quite what I want. Have you written a book, maybe? Thinking of writing one? Developing a new historical or economic theory—the spirillix might be anything! You haven't?

  Well. I'll be going. You don't have any relatives of the same name who fool around with tools and stuff—no? I've got a lot of people to visit. You'd be amazed at the number of Wenceslauses and variations there are—

  Wait a minute. Did you say you'd made—you'd invented a new mousetrap?

  Here, have another cigar. Sit down. Now tell me, this mousetrap of yours—just how does it work? It catches mice, yes. But exactly what does it do?

  AFTERWORD

  I wrote this story immediately after "Child's Play" was accepted by John W. Campbell, and I used the time-travel vocabulary and background of "Child's Play." I was dreaming of having my own special series in Astounding—my own version of Asimov's Empire, Heinlein's Future History, or H. Beam Piper's Paratime Police. It was cheeky of me, I eventually decided, and gave it up.

  My greatest source of pride, though, when I had completed the story, was that it came out exactly as I had visualized it, the first time I had managed such a feat. I had yet to learn—as I did many years later, upon listening to a radio broadcast interview with E.M. Forster—that the most exciting and creative experience for a writer was to look upon a finished piece of work and say, "Now, where on earth did that come from?" And to realize that, to continue quoting Mr. Forster, "It came from nowhere on earth."

  "Errand Boy" did not make nearly the splash that "Child's Play" did. The only strong reaction was from a paint manufacturing company. They informed me in a letter forwarded from Astounding that they had found the passage in which Ernest brings back paint from the future very interesting and profitable. They had experimented and found that they could actually produce in the present day a green paint with orange polka dots. It seemed to be marketable.

  Did I have any other money-making ideas for paints, they wanted to know?

  I wrote back and told them that there was something I wanted to know in my turn. What would be in it for me?

  They were apparently too shocked at my crass commercial attitude to reply.

  Written 1947——Published 1947

  A LAMP FOR MEDUSA

  "And thence came the Son of Danae, flaming with courage and spirit;

  Wise Athena brought him thus to the fellowship of these stalwart men.

  He slew the Gorgon and winged back, bringing to the islanders

  The head with its writhing snake-locks, the Terror that froze to stone."

  —Pindar, Pythian Odes

  A LAMP FOR MEDUSA

  The bit of parchment on which the words were written in large, blotty letters had a bad smell. Like everything else in the apartment, Percy S. Yuss thought bitterly. He turned the parchment around in his fingers—annoyed at the strange discomfort he experienced in handling it—and grunted in disbelief.

  Its back still had a few fine brown hairs clinging to the badly tanned surface. Someone had evidently gone to the trouble of killing an animal and skinning it, merely to write a translation of a long-dead poet's little-known verse.

  Such eccentrics as these three rooms had known!

  He dropped the handkerchief-size square of dead tissue on the floor, with the rest of the fantastic garbage, that varied from a ballet dancer's worn white slippers to four wooden chair legs which had evidently been chopped off with an exceedingly sharp axe—to judge from the unbelievable smoothness of the cut-away surface.

  What an amazing and varied collection of junk! He shook his head as he shepherded the stuff into a great pile with the broom he'd discovered in the kitchen. A man's safety razor, a woman's curling iron, notebook upon notebook filled with strange and unrecognizable scripts. Not to mention the heap of locked suitcases on the top of which he'd just chucked his own battered valise.

  In these days, one did not look gift apartments in the foyer, so to speak. Still, he couldn't help wondering why these previous tenants hadn't bothered to come back for their possessions. He found himself tingling uncomfortably, as when he'd first seen the parchment.
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  Maybe they hadn't paid their rent. No, that couldn't be. It was such a wonderfully small rent, that even people who didn't own a half interest in a mildly bankrupt hash-house wouldn't have too much trouble raising it. It had been the lowness of the rental figure that had made Percy scramble frantically in his wallet for the thirty-five dollars' worth of cumshaw the superintendent had demanded. After years of tramping from dismal furnished room to dingy sublet to get at long last a place as cheap as this in his own name!

  Percy sighed the smug, deeply happy sigh of the happy householder. It smelled, it was badly littered and would require at least two full days to get clean, but it was his, all his. Enthusiastically, he bent his back into the broom again.

  —|—

  The hall door opened and Mrs. Danner walked in without knocking. From the living room, where he was scraping the rubbish together, Percy saw the rather badly used-up old lady, who served as a combination janitor, building superintendent and renting agent, stagger into his kitchen. A half-empty fifth of whiskey swung restlessly from one bony hand as a kind of liquid epitaph to thirty-five dollars that had once been in Percy's possession and was no longer.

  She leaned against a wall, first patting it gently so that it wouldn't get frightened and leap away. "Good old, lovely old, moneymaking apartment," she muttered. "They come and they go, they come and they go, but you're always left for me. And every time they come, little Marybelle Danner gets another ten bottles. Darling, gorgeous old apartment, you're my splurfsk!"

  The last word, Percy realized as he walked sternly into the kitchen, was not an entirely novel term of endearment coined on the spot by Mrs. Danner, as much as it was a very ordinary word dissolved beyond recognition into the hearty gulp of whiskey with which she frequently punctuated her sentences.

  "Pretty apartment!" she continued, rubbing her back against the filthy wall like a kitten which had grown to lanky old age without ever having become a cat. "The owners don't pay me enough to feed the teensiest canary, my children don't care what becomes of their sweet old ma, but you watch out for me, don't you? You won't let me sturvleglglg. Every single time a new tenant—"

  She lowered the bottle with which she had been preparing a new and moister period. She leaned forward from the hips, blinking madly through worn, red-lined eyes. "You still here?"

  "Yes, I'm still here," Percy told her angrily. "After all, I just moved in this morning! What are you doing in my apartment?"

  Mrs. Danner straightened. She waved her head from side to side like a bewildered gray banner. "How can he still be here?" she asked the neck of the bottle in a confidential whisper. "It's been over four hours since he took possession. None of the others ever stayed that lurngsht." She wiped her lips. "Not one of them!"

  "Look here. I paid one month's rent in advance. I also gave you a big hunk of cash under the table, even though it's illegal. I have to work pretty hard for my money in a hot and stinking little luncheonette that seems to go further into the red with every bit of business we do."

  "Too bad," Mrs. Danner told him consolingly. "We should never have elected Hoover. I voted for Al Smiglugglug. He wouldn't have let the Kaiser get away. He'd have got Eisenhower after him. Here. You need a drinkie before you disappear."

  "The reason," Percy went on patiently, "that I paid you all this cabbage was so I could have an apartment of my own. I don't want you walking in without knocking. This is my place. Now was there anything you wanted?"

  She batted her eyes mournfully at him, took another shot, belched, and started for the door. "All I wanted was the apartment. But if it isn't ready yet, it just isn't reyurmph. I can wait another hour or two if I have to. I'm no purksk."

  The new tenant closed the door behind her very carefully. He noticed again that there was an area of splintered wood around the place where the lock had been—as if it had been necessary to break the door down upon the last occupant.

  What did that point to? Suicide, maybe. Or Mrs. Danner's mention of disappearances—could that be taken seriously? It would explain all that queer junk, all those full suitcases, as if people had just been moving in when—

  When what? This was the scientific twentieth century, and he was in one of the most civilized cities on the face of the Earth. People didn't just walk into a cold tenement flat on the West Side and vanish. No, it wasn't logical.

  Anyway, he'd better get a lock on the door before he left for work. He glanced at his watch. He had an hour and a half. Just enough time to take a quick bath, buy the lock, and screw it on. He'd finish cleaning the place tomorrow.

  The bath was a tiny, four-foot affair that stood high on angle-iron legs beside the kitchen sink. It had a huge enamel cover that was hinged to the wall. There was more junk piled on the cover than there had been on the floor. With a sigh, Percy began to carry the stuff into the half-clean living room.

  By the time he was through, the other room was a mess again and he was hot, tired, and disgusted. Trust Percy Sactrist Yuss to get this kind of bargain, he thought angrily as he wedged the cover up against the wall, filled the little bathtub with water, and began to undress. A dark, dirty apartment, filled with the garbage of countless previous tenants, and not only had he had to pay extra money to get the place, but now it seemed there was a curse on it, too. And a curious drunken female superintendent who would probably let him have all the privacy of a hot suspect in the Monday morning police line-up.

  He took a towel and a fresh bar of soap from his valise. His mood grew blacker as he realized his feet had become coated with a kind of greasy grime as a result of standing on the kitchen floor. The place probably had vermin, too.

  Bending down to brush off his feet so that he wouldn't carry the soil requirements of a potato patch into the bathtub, he noticed a scrap of white on the floor. It was the parchment with the fragment of classic poetry laboriously traced out on one side. He'd scuffed it into the kitchen while tramping back and forth.

  As he glanced at it cursorily once more, another peculiar electric shiver went through him.

  "...He slew the Gorgon and winged back, bringing to the islanders

  The head with its writhing snake-locks, the Terror that froze to stone."

  Who was it who had slain the Gorgon? Some character in Greek mythology—but who exactly he just couldn't remember. For some reason, the identity and the name escaped him completely. And usually he had a fine memory for such little items. Twenty years spent working out crossword puzzles after a frenzied day dealing them off the arm in dining cars was almost the equivalent of a college education.

  He shrugged and flipped the parchment away. To his annoyance, it bounced off the upright bathtub cover and into the water. Trust his luck! He hung the towel on a crossbar of the tall bathtub legs and climbed in, having to duck his head and twist his shoulders down laboriously to avoid the wooden dish-closets set on the wall some three feet above the tub.

  His knees were well out of the water in the little bathtub, practically digging into his chest. Washing himself under these conditions was going to be real cozy!

  It was impossible now to recapture the earlier mood of exultation at having an apartment of his own. He felt he'd been taken, as he'd felt all through his life after being persuaded to go into some scheme or other. Like buying a half-interest in a restaurant which the sheriff already regarded with fond proprietary interest.

  "I'm not even taken," he said unhappily. "I give myself away!"

  And on top of everything, the plug leaked! The level of water sank rapidly down to his hips. Cursing his parents for being attracted to each other in the first place, Percy reached forward to jab it more securely in place. As he did so, the parchment, floating face up on the water, caught his eye.

  Long strands of hair now trailed it wetly, and the words were beginning to dissolve in the water. He wasn't interested in it; more, he felt very strongly that he shouldn't be interested in it, that here, in this bit of archaic verse, was more living danger than he had ever known in his scr
eamingest nightmares. He felt that strange tingle begin again in the inner recesses of his body, and he knew that his instincts to toss it away had been right, that the curiosity that impelled him to read it every time he picked it up was utterly, terribly—

  "And thence came the son of Danae—"

  Almost against his will, his mind wondered. Thence? Where thence? Somehow, he felt he knew. But why should he feel that way? He'd never read a line by Pindar before. And why should he be wondering about it in the first place? He had other troubles, lots of them.

  His hand swept the parchment up like a particularly disgusting insect. Up and over the side of the bathtub. Right into the bluish waves that billowed all around him.

  Into the sea.

  He hardly had time to let his jaw drop. Because the bathtub began to sink. Percy was bailing before he realized he was doing it.

  This time the water was bubbling into the tub. With a convulsive gesture of his entire body that almost threw him over the side, he clamped his left foot down hard upon the defective plug and splashed the tepid mixture out with two threshing, barely cupped bands.

  In spite of his inaccurate roiling and tossing, he had the tub all but emptied in a matter of seconds. A thin trickle of sea water still lounged out from between his toes. He reached over the side, noticing uncomfortably that the rim was a bare two inches above the sea's restless surface. Yes, the towel was still in place, knotted intricately around the cross-bar. It was soaking wet, but it made a magnificent reinforcement for the plug. With fingers that had sharpened into a remarkable deftness under the grinding surprise of the moment, he jabbed corners of the towel all around the edges of the rubber plug.