The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  “Six? Seven and a half?”

  Emigdio Valentinez laid the mirror down. “It was nice of you to drop out to see me, Hartle. It was nice of you to listen to my fun-and-games with lovestonite. But now, if you don’t mind, I’m going down to the cove. There’s an effect of the sun on the algae there at this time of day—”

  Stag Hartle watched the departing figure of the man who was possibly the world’s greatest living painter and certainly its most successful. He swore to and at himself with dull persistence for a good five minutes.

  Then idly he picked up the lovestonite mirror and operated it as Valentinez had instructed him. Nice little gadget. Clever technician lost in that painter. Futile sort of gag. Nothing commercial, but—

  Stag Hartle opened his mouth wide and shut it again firmly. He carried the mirror out into the bright sunlight of late afternoon.

  When he came back into the house, there was a grin of satisfaction on his face. It was hard to keep his eyes off the charred hole in the wooden porch outside.

  He worked quickly. From his vest pocket he took that convenient clip-on cylinder which looked like a stylus, but unscrewed to reveal a stick of a paraderm. He thrust it under his armpit and held it there until body heat had softened it. Then he carefully coated the inside of his fingers and the palms of his hands. He allowed it to dry and then flexed his fingers experimentally. The cords stood out in his powerfully wiry wrists.

  He thought of historical sollies and the great convenience of knives and pistols. But no matter how Devarupian the world, a man could still kill if he had strong hands and no fear of a one-way trip.

  Emigdio Valentinez added one more flick of his deft brush and then realized that the perfect moment had passed. Only one sixth of an hour out of the twenty-four when the light in this spot was exactly as it had been that day when he had halted transfixed and felt that strange gripping of his bowels which meant “This is it!”

  He could fill the rest of his time satisfactorily enough. There had been the weeks of delightfully restful research on the lovestonite mirror, and now there lay ahead of him many more weeks, by no means restful, to be devoted to the object for which he had contrived the gadget—a perfect self-portrait.

  He smiled, and smiled at himself for smiling. How fortunate, in all due modesty, is the artist who is a worthy subject of his own brush! He knew that in a way he was beautiful. He knew, and found a bitter sort of pleasure in the knowledge, that a girl’s bedroom was far more apt to be adorned by a color photo of himself than by a reprolith of one of his paintings.

  Well, this would combine the two apeals—his magnum opus. Though if ever he could finish this composition of rock and algae and water and sun—

  Where he stood he could see nothing that was not part of nature save himself, his palette and his easel. It might have been a scene out of the long-dead past. Cezanne, say, or some other old master might have stood thus in the sun back in those dim days when the advance of science was beginning with its little creeps. Painting is something apart from progress. He knew that he could never catch the sun as Cezanne had. He knew that not he, nor any other man living, could approach the clarity of Vermeer or the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt. He could make an overnight jaunt to the Moon if he wished, but he could not capture in paint the soul of Devarupa as El Greco had captured that of St. Francis. Art did not necessarily progress with progress.

  And yet the lovestonite mirror might be the first true contribution of science to painting. He smiled, that smile that was not intentionally either melancholy or wisful, and started across the sand to his death.

  I.

  A tiny five-meter rocket flashed past the window of the stratoliner.

  “Poor devil,” the girl sighed.

  Gan Garrett blessed the poor devil, whoever he was and whatever he’d done. For an hour he had been trying to think of some way of opening a conversation with his black-haired, blue-eyed traveling companion.

  “I know,” he agreed sympathetically.

  “Living death,” the girl went on. “Premature burial, like that funny obsession of horror you get in nineteenth-century writers. That rocket shooting out, headed no place forever—”

  “But what other solution is there?” Garrett asked. “If no one may kill, certainly the State may not. We have abandoned the collective mania of capital punishment as thoroughly as that of war. How else would Devarupa have had us treat those who were formerly thought fit to be executed?”

  “Segregation?” the girl ventured hesitantly.

  “If you recall your history classes, that didn’t work so well. Remember the Revolt of the Segregated in ’73? When you mass together all those who are undeveloped enough to wish to kill—”

  The girl’s eyes stared out into space, following the now invisible course of the one-way trip. “You’re right, of course. It’s the only way. But I still say, ‘Poor devil.’ You’re headed for Sollywood?”

  Garrett nodded.

  “Actor?”

  “Hardly. Technical expert for Mr. Breakstone’s epic on Devarupa. I’m an historian, not unknown in my field, I must confess. You may have read my little work on ‘The Guilt for the War of the Twentieth Century’?” His voice was arid and his bearing purely academic; despite his disclaimer, he had never done a more convincing job of acting.

  There had been nothing dry or academic about Gan Garrett the day before when he breezed into the office of the Secretary of Allocation. “The post office is going to raise the devil about your requisitioning me,” he announced. “I was just getting on the track of the highjackers that’ve been operating on the lunar mail rockets.”

  “That’s all right,” the secretary said dryly. “I’ve been over your reports with the postmaster and he agrees with me that a subordinate can carry on from there. And we can’t all have the services of Gan Garrett at once.”

  Garrett grinned. “Look,” he interposed. “Don’t tell me how good I am. I couldn’t take it. But what’s the new job?”

  The secretary leafed through the dossier before him. “According to this, Garrett, you made the highest rating in the adaptability classes that the W.B.I. school has ever seen. You also displayed a marked aptitude for pre-Devarupian history.”

  Garrett nodded. “I liked those old times. I know how true Devarupa’s ideas are, and yet there’s something about the wanton recklessness of the old armed days—”

  “Very well. You are going to Sollywood as a technical adviser on an epic now being prepared. No one outside of this secretariat will have the least idea that your job is not authentic; and you’d better be good at it.”

  “I’ll run over my library tonight and take forty or fifty microbooks along. My visual memory’ll see me through. But what’s the real job?”

  The secretary paused. “Garrett, do you know anything about lovestonite?”

  Gan Garrett probed in his memory. “Let’s see— Something about Australia. I think I remember: Scientists working a couple of years on finding some use for those deposits of new clay found in the development of central Australia. At last this Lovestone hits on a method of making a vitreous plastic of it. Everybody hepped up down under. Great hopes of a new industry. But nobody can find a thing to do with the plastic. Every function it can perform is handled easier and cheaper by something else. Some queer properties with light—slows it down, or something—so steady small demand from optical and physical labs. Otherwise nil. Is that about it?”

  The secretary smiled. “If you can do as well as that unprepared and out of your field, you ought to get by on your new job. Yes, that’s the history of lovestonite— up till last month. Then all of a sudden a terrific demand from California. Imports jump around a thousand percent. The processing plant becomes a major industry. Of course, like all requests for raw materials, this was cleared through this secretariat. No questions at first, because there’s such a surplus of the clay there was no need for regulation. But eventually we began to wonder.”

  Garrett whistled quietly. �
�Armslegging?”

  “I don’t see how. It doesn’t seem scientifically conceivable that lovestonite could have any lethal powers. But there is something wrong. We queried the plant on what it was producing with lovestonite. They said mirrors.”

  “Mirrors?”

  “I know. It doesn’t make sense. A lovestonite mirror is possible, I suppose, but it would cost double anything that’s on the market and wouldn’t work so well. So something is wrong. And when something is wrong in California, you know where to learn the secret.”

  Garrett nodded. “Sollywood. The whole state’s just a suburb to that.”

  “So—” the secretary opened a drawer and took out a small and gracefully carved plesiosaurus. At the top of the delicately curving neck was a gold collar from which a small chain ran. “You never wear jewelry on your identification bracelet, do you?” Garrett shook his head. “Function where function belongs. No trimmings.”

  “But you’ll wear this. It’s by Kubicek, one of his best, I think. He says lovestonite is a surprisingly good vehicle for carving. It might help to start conversations. Beyond that, you’re on your own. No instructions but these: Do a good job as technical adviser, and find out what’s going on in California.”

  The head of the plesiosaur was typical Kubicek. It had, not the anthropomorphic cuteness of gift-shop animals, but a prehistoric richness of reptilian knowledge and cynicism. “Between us,” said Gan Garrett, “we’ll find out all there is to know. And I hope,” he added, “that it is armslegging.”

  The girl was looking at his mascot now. “That’s a nice thing. Kubicek, isn’t it? I usually somehow don’t think much of men who wear jewelry on their identification bracelets, but that’s such a lovely swizard.”

  “A what?”

  “That’s what I used to call a plesiosaur when I saw pictures of them when I was little. They looked like part swan and part lizard, so I called them swizards. But what’s it made out of? That isn’t a natural stone, and it doesn’t look like any of the usual carving plastics.”

  “It’s lovestonite.”

  “Oh,” said the girl.

  “Odd stuff,” Garrett went on. “Not much use for it ordinarily.”

  “Isn’t there?” There was an odd tone of suggestion underlying her remark.

  “Is there? I’d never heard of any.”

  “I don’t know . . . I’m damned if I know,” she said with quite disproportionate vigor. Her blue eyes flashed with puzzled irritation. “Damn lovestonite, anyway.” Gan Garrett held himself back. A technical authority on history should not be too pryingly eager with questions.

  The girl changed the subject abruptly. “So you’re an authority on the War of the Twentieth Century? That must be exciting, kind of. I haven’t read so much serious history, but I know all the Harkaway novels. It must have . . . there was so much to living in those days.”

  Secretly Garrett almost agreed, but he replied in character. “Nonsense, my dear girl. Those were days of poverty and oppression, of want and terror. Science had turned only its black mask to us then; the greatness of man’s intellect was expended on destruction.”

  “I know all that. But think how much more it meant to be alive when you were face to face with death.”

  “No. There is nothing glamorous about death from malnutrition, nor is there anything colorful about being blown to bits by a bomb.”

  “Don’t be stuffy.”

  “I’m not being stuffy. We invest the past with glamour; we always have. We say, ‘Mustn’t it have been wonderful to be alive in the days of Elizabeth! Or Napoleon, or Hitler?’ But the only good thing about the War of the Twentieth Century was its total badness. Only such complete evil could have prepared the world for the teachings of Devarupa.”

  The girl looked sobered for a moment. “I know. Devarupa was . . . well, wonderful. But I’ve never thought he meant peace quite like this. He must have meant a peace that was alive—that gave off sparks, that made music. Peace isn’t just something to wallow in. Peace has to be fought for.”

  “You’re Irish, aren’t you?” said Gan Garrett dryly.

  “Yes; why?”

  “It takes the Hibernian to produce that kind of statement. An Irish bull, technically, is it not? It was an Irish scientist on our faculty who told me that microbes are tiny all right, but a virus is littler than a dozen microbes.”

  She laughed. “I know. I sound like the old Irish gag about ‘There ain’t gonna be no flightin’ here if I have to knock the stuffin’ out of every wan of yez.’ I know; my dialect gets mixed. But the whole world’s mixed now—and how is it we Irish still manage to stick out? Still, what I said is true, even if it does sound funny.”

  “It’s been tried,” said Garrett as historian. “The Pax Romana worked that way: Peace, ye underlings; or Rome will crush you to the ground. But the Empire weakened and was itself crushed, by its own chosen means of force. Peace has to be rooted in something deeper than fighting.”

  “Something deeper, yes. But you need the fighting, too. If people still had the guts to fight, we’d have a colony on Mars by now. But they’d sooner sit on their cushions and sew a fine seam. Maybe the world was better when there were weapons and—”

  “The W.B.I. still has weapons.”

  “Those . . . those popguns?” The girl’s eyes flashed, and she tossed her black hair. “And what do you know about the W.B.I., anyway, you . . . you academician?”

  “Nothing, my dear,” the W.B.I.’s most capable agent admitted gently.

  “Then shut up!”

  They traveled the next half hour in silence. The ship’s windows proffered no view but a sea of clouds. Beneath those clouds, Garrett calculated from his watch, lay the opulence of the reclaimed deserts of the Southwest; a few more minutes and—

  He turned again to the girl. Her reaction to lovestonite made it imperative that he keep in touch with her, even if other motives had not contributed their share to his desire. “You live in Sollywood?” he ventured.

  “What do you care, you historian?’

  “But do you?”

  “Of course not!” she snorted. “I live in Novosibirsk and I’m flying out here for a beam test.”

  The ship dipped down through the clouds and emerged into rain. Fine drops streaked the window, but far below Garrett could glimpse some of the infinite variety of locations that comprise most of southern California, all dry and aglow with light under their vast domes.

  The girl looked out at the rain. “Welcome to California,” she said. “And I hope you drown.”

  Gan Garrett detached his identification plaque from its bracelet and placed it in the slot by the imposing entrance to Metropolis Solid Pictures, Inc. The beam filtered through his set of perforations, and the door dilated. No query; the combination must have been set to his perfs as soon as he was hired.

  He stepped inside, apparently still in the open air but now out of the rain. Five moving sidewalks started off in different directions from this entrance, and he hesitated, studying the indicator.

  A life devoted to all the works of the W.B.I., and especially to the suppression of armslegging, had heightened the rapidity of Garrett’s reflexes. His movements were economical, but automatic and swift. Thus, he now found that he had, almost without knowing it, moved his body a few centimeters to the right and drawn what the black-haired girl had called his “popgun.” Stuck fast in the center of the indicator quivered a knife.

  Even Garrett could not repress a slight shudder at the narrow squeak. He whirled about, stooping and weaving as he did so with that skilled technique of his which disconcerted any but the finest marksman. There was not a soul in sight in this open area.

  Calmly Garrett plucked and pocketed the knife and chose the proper sidewalk, lire episode in one way had told him nothing. Anywhere but in Sollywood the very existence of a weapon would have had its significance, since the careful manufacturing regulations of the Department of Allocation permit no allotments of material for weapons save t
hose such as Garrett now held in his hand. Even these are carefully controlled, and every one that has ever been manufactured is by now either outworn and destroyed or on the person of a W.B.I. man.

  They are not lethal, these “popguns.” They are compressed-gas pistols using carbon dioxide to fire a pellet filled with needlelike crystals of comatin, that most powerful and instantaneous of anaesthetics. They are, as is inevitable in a Devarupian world, purely a defensive weapon.

  But the makers of sollies need to give the effect of lethal weapons in their historical epics; and they can secure permission from the Department for Metal to make plausible replicas. The weapons must by strict statute be nonlethal, blunt in the case of swords and daggers, the barrels blocked in the case of firearms; and rendering them lethal is an offense earning a one-way trip. But once the metal allocation has been secured, a desperate man will take his chance on lethalizing a prop weapon. So here the existence of a lethal dagger was no surprise.

  He remembered stories of the past in which detectives examined weapons for fingerprints. They would be no help here, either; the criminal who neglected to use paraderm, so much more convenient than gloves, had been unheard-of for a century. The sole use of prints was no longer criminological, but in problems of civilian identification.

  Still, he would keep the dagger; as evidence, he told himself, hardly daring admit that there was something consoling about carrying a forbidden weapon. For the one item of significance which the attack had revealed was this: There was a leak somewhere. Someone in Sollywood knew that he was more than a technical adviser. And that in turn meant that the lovestonite problem was quite as important as the secretary had feared.

  Garrett fingered the lovestonite plesiosaur. Swizard, that girl had called it.

  Sacheverell Breakstone, the great man of Metropolis, received Gan Garrett in person. He did not wear the usual native costume of the district—the slack trousers, the open shirt, and the colorful ascot which dated back to tradition long before the invention of solid pictures. His costume, Garrett realized, went back even further—the woven sheeps wool coat, the cloth headpiece with the rear projection, the leather leg casings. It was a curious anachronistic survival, but it was becoming to the short stock body of S.B., lending him a certain outrageous dignity.