“Let me go,” Eldon said, “and I’ll give you a pair of glasses free. Any pair I have.”
“My eyes are perfect,” the phocomelus said. “Everything about me is perfect. Parts are missing, but I don’t need them; I can do better without them. I can get down this hill faster than you, for instance.”
“Who built your ’mobile?” Eldon asked. Surely in seven years it would have become tarnished and partly broken, like everything else.
“I built it,” the phocomelus said.
“How can you build your own ’mobile? That’s a contradiction.”
“I used to be body-wired. Now I’m brain-wired; I did that myself, too. I’m the handy, up here. Those old extensors the Government built before the war—they weren’t even as good as the flesh things, like you have.” The phocomelus grimaced. He had a thin, flexible face, with a sharp nose and extremely white teeth, a face ideal for the emotion which he now showed Eldon Blaine.
“Dangerfield says that the handies are the most valuable people in the world,” Eldon said. “He declared Worldwide Handyman Week, one time we were listening, and he named different handies who were especially well-known. What’s your name? Maybe he mentioned you.”
“Hoppy Harrington,” the phocomelus said. “But I know he didn’t mention me because I keep myself in the background, still; it isn’t time for me to make my name in the world, as I’m going to be doing. I let the local people see a little of what I can do, but they’re supposed to be quiet about it.”
“Sure they’d be quiet,” Eldon said. “They don’t want to lose you. We’re missing our handy, right now, and we really feel it. Could you take on the Bolinas area for a little while, do you think? We’ve got plenty to trade you. In the Emergency hardly anybody got over the mountain to invade us, so we’re relatively untouched.”
“I’ve been down there to Bolinas,” Hoppy Harrington said.
“In fact I’ve traveled all around, even as far inland as Sacramento. Nobody has seen what I’ve seen; I can cover fifty miles a day in my ’mobile.” His lean face twitched and then he stammered, “I wouldn’t go back to Bolinas because there are sea monsters in the ocean, there.”
“Who says so?” Eldon demanded. “That’s just superstition—tell me who said that about our community.”
“I think it was Dangerfield.”
“No, he couldn’t,” Eldon said. “He can be relied on, he wouldn’t peddle such trash as that. I never once heard him tell a superstition on any of his programs. Maybe he was kidding; I bet he was kidding and you took him seriously.”
“The hydrogen bombs woke up the sea monsters,” Hoppy said, “From their slumber in the depths.” He nodded earnestly.
“You come and see our community,” Eldon said. “We’re orderly and advanced, a lot more so than any city. We even have streetlights going again, four of them for an hour in the evening. I’m surprised a handy would believe such superstition.”
The phocomelus looked chagrined. “You never can be sure,” he murmured. “I guess maybe it wasn’t Dangerfield I heard it from.”
Below them, on the ascending road, a horse moved; the sound of its hoofs reached them and they both turned. A big fleshy man with a red face came riding up and up, toward them, peering at them. As he rode he called, “Glasses man! Is that you?”
“Yes,” Eldon said, as the horse veered into the grass extinguished driveway of the Raub house. “You have the antibiotics, mister?”
“June Raub will bring them,” the big florid man said, reining his horse to a stop. “Glasses man, let’s see what you have. I’m near-sighted but I also have an acute astigmatism in my left eye; can you help me?” He approached on foot, still peering.
“I can’t fit you,” Eldon said, “because Hoppy Harrington has me tied up.”
“For God’s sake, Hoppy,” the big florid man said with agitation. “Let the glasses man go so he can fit me; I’ve been waiting months and I don’t mean to wait any longer.”
“Okay, Leroy,” Hoppy Harrington said sullenly. And, from around Eldon, the metal mesh uncoiled and then slithered back across the ground to the waiting phocomelus in the center of his shiny, intricate ’mobile,
As the satellite passed over the Chicago area its wing-like extended sensors picked up a flea signal, and in his earphones Walter Dangerfield heard the faint, distant, hollowed-out voice from below.
“… and please play ‘Walzing Matilda,’ a lot of us like that. And play ‘The Woodpecker Song.’ And—” The flea signal faded out, and he head only static. It had definitely not been a laser beam, he thought to himself archly.
Into his microphone, Dangerfield said, “Well, friends, we have a request here for ‘Walzing Matilda.’ ” He reached to snap a switch at the controls of a tape transport. “The great bass-baritone Peter Dawson—which is also the name of a very good branch of Scotch—in ‘Walzing Matilda.’ ” From well-worn memory he selected the correct reel of tape, and in a moment it was on the transport, turning.
As the music played, Walt Dangerfield tuned his receiving equipment, hoping once more to pick up the same flea signal. However, instead he found himself party to a two-way transmission between military units involved in police action somewhere in upstate Illinois. Their brisk chatter interested him, and he listened until the end of the music.
“Lots of luck to you boys in uniform,” he said into the microphone, then. “Catch those boodle-burners and bless you all.” He chuckled, because if ever a human being had immunity from retaliation, it was he. No one on Earth could reach him—it had been attempted six times since the Emergency, with no success. “Catch those bad guys … or should I say catch those good guys. Say, who are the good guys, these days?” His receiving equipment had picked up, in the last few weeks, a number of complaints about Army brutality. “Now let me tell you something, boys,” he said smoothly. “Watch out for those squirrel rifles; that’s all.” He began hunting through the satellite’s tape library for the recording of “The Woodpecker Song.” “That’s all, brother,” he said, and put on the tape.
Below him the world was in darkness, its night side turned his way; yet already he could see the rim of day appearing on the edge, and soon he would be passing into that once more. Lights here and there glowed like holes poked in the surface of the planet which he had left seven years ago—left for another purpose, another goal entirely. A much more noble one.
His was not the sole satellite still circling Earth, but it was the sole one with life aboard. Everyone else had long since perished. But they had not been outfitted as he and Lydia had been, for a decade of life on another world. He was lucky: besides food and water and air he had a million miles of video and audio tape to keep him amused. And now, with it, he kept them amused, the remnants of the civilization which had shot him up here in the first place. They had botched the job of getting him to Mars—fortunately for them. Their failure had paid them vital dividends ever since.
“Hoode hoode hoo,” Walt Dangerfield chanted into his microphone, using the transmitter which should have carried his voice back from millions of miles, not merely a couple hundred. “Things you can do with the timer out of an old R.C.A. washer-dryer combination. This item arrives from a handy in the Geneva area; thanks to you, Georg Schilper—I know everyone will be pleased to hear you give this timely tip in your own words.” He played into his transmitter the tape recording of the handyman himself speaking; the entire Great Lakes region of the United States would now know Georg Schilper’s bit of lore, and would no doubt wisely apply it at once. The world hungered for the knowledge tucked away in pockets here and there, knowledge which—without Dangerfield—would be confined to its point of origin, perhaps forever.
After the tape of Georg Schilper he put on his canned reading from Of Human Bondage and rose stiffly from his seat.
There was a pain in his chest which worried him; it had appeared one day, located beneath his breastbone, and now for the hundredth time he got down one of the microfilms of medical
information and began scanning the section dealing with the heart. Does it feel like the heel of a hand squeezing my breath out of me? he asked himself. Someone pushing down with all his weight? It was difficult to recall what “weight” felt like in the first place. Or does it merely burn … and if so, when? Before meals or after?
Last week he had made contact with a hospital in Tokyo, had described his symptoms. The doctors were not sure what to tell him. What you need, they had said, is an electrocardiogram, but how could he give himself a test like that up here? How could anyone, any more? The Japanese doctors were living in the past, or else there had been more of a revival in Japan than he realized; than anyone realized.
Amazing, he thought suddenly, that I’ve survived so long. It did not seem long, though, because his time-sense had become faulty. And he was a busy man; at this moment, six of his tape recorders monitored six much-used frequencies, and before the reading from the Maugham book had ended he would be obliged to play them back. They might contain nothing or they might contain hours of meaningful talk. One never knew. If only, he thought, I had been able to make use of the high-speed transmission … but the proper decoders were no longer in existence, below. Hours could have been compressed into seconds, and he could have given each area in turn a complete account. As it was, he had to dole it out in small clusters, with much repetition. Sometimes it took months to read through a single novel, this way.
But at least he had been able to lower the frequency on which the satellite’s transmitter broadcast to a band which the people below could receive on a common AM radio. That had been his one big achievement; that, by itself, had made him into what he was.
The reading of the Maugham book ended, then automatically restarted itself; it droned from the start once more for the next area below. Walt Dangerfield ignored it and continued to consult his medical reference microfilms. I think it’s only spasms of the pyloric valve, he decided. If I had phenobarbital here … but it had been used up several years ago; his wife, in her last great suicidal depression, had consumed it all—consumed it and then taken her life anyhow. It had been the abrupt silence of the Soviet space station, oddly enough, that had started her depression; up until then she had believed that they would all be reached and brought safely back down to the surface. The Russians have starved to death, all ten of them, but no one had foreseen it because they had kept up their duty-oriented line of scientific patter right into the last few hours.
“Hoode hoode hoo,” Dangerfield said to himself as he read about the pyloric valve and its spasms. “Folks,” he murmured. “I have this funny pain brought on by over-indulgence … what I need is four-way relief, don’t you agree?” He snapped on his microphone, cutting out the tape-in-progress. “Remember those old ads?” he asked his darkened, unseen audience below. “Before the war—let’s see, how did they go? Are you building more H-bombs but enjoying it less?” He chuckled. “Has thermonuclear war got you down? New York, can you pick me up, yet? I want every one of you within the reach of my voice, all sixty-five of you, to quick light up a match so I’ll know you’re there.”
In his earphones a loud signal came in. “Dangerfield, this is the New York Port Authority; can you give us any idea of the weather?”
“Oh,” Dangerfield said, “we’ve got fine weather coming. You can put out to sea in those little boats and catch those little radioactive fish; nothing to worry about.”
Another voice, fainter, came in now. “Mr. Dangerfield, could you possibly please play some of those opera arias you have? We’d especially appreciate ‘Thy Tiny Hand is Frozen’ from La Boheme.”
“Heck, I can sing that,” Dangerfield said, reaching for the tape as he hummed tenorishly into the microphone.
Returning to Bolinas that night, Eldon Blaine fed the first of the antibiotics to his child and then quickly drew his wife aside. “Listen, they have a top-notch handy up in West Marin which they’ve been keeping quiet about, and only twenty miles from here. I think we should send a delegation up there to nap him and bring him down here.” He added, “He’s a phoce and you should see the ’mobile he built for himself; none of the handies we’ve had could do anything half that good.” Putting his wool jacket back on he went to the door of their room. “I’m going to ask the Committee to vote on it.”
“But our ordinance against funny people,” Patricia protested. “And Mrs. Wallace is Chairman of the Committee this month; you know how she feels, she’d never let any more phoces come here and settle. I mean, we have four as it is and she’s always complaining about them.”
“That ordinance refers only to funny people who could become a financial burden to the community,” Eldon said, “I ought to know; I helped draft it. Hoppy Harrington is no burden; he’s an asset—the ordinance doesn’t cover him, and I’m going to stand up to Mrs. Wallace and fight it out. I know I can get official permission; I’ve got it all worked out how we’ll do the napping. They invited us to come up to their area and listen to the satellite, and we’ll do that; we’ll show up but not just to listen to Dangerfield. While they’re involved in that we’ll nap Hoppy; we’ll put his phocomobile out of action and haul him down here, and they’ll never know what happened. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And our police force will protect us.”
Patricia said, “I’m scared of phoces. They have peculiar powers, not natural ones; everybody knows it. He probably built his ’mobile by means of magic.”
Laughing with derision, Eldon Blaine said, “So much the better. Maybe that’s what we need: magic spells, a community magician. I’m all for it.”
“I’m going to see how Gwen is,” Patricia said, starting toward the screened-off portion of the room where their child lay on her cot. “I won’t have any part of this; I think it’s dreadful, what you’re doing.”
Eldon Blaine stepped from the room, out into the night darkness. In a moment he was striding down the path toward the Wallaces’ house.
As the citizens of West Marin County one by one entered the Foresters’ Hall and seated themselves, June Raub adjusted the variable condenser of the twelve-volt car radio and noticed that once again Hoppy Harrington had not shown up to hear the satellite. What was it he had said? “I don’t like to listen to sick people.” A strange thing to say, she thought to herself.
From the speaker of the radio static issued and then first faint beepings from the satellite. In a few more minutes they would be picking it up clearly … unless the wet-cell battery powering the radio chose to give out again, as it had briefly the other day.
The rows of seated people listened attentively as the initial words from Dangerfield began to emerge from the static. “… lice-type typhus is said to be breaking out in Washington up to the Canadian border,” Dangerfield was saying. “So stay away from there, my friends. If this report is true it’s a very bad sign indeed. Also, a report from Portland, Oregon, more on the cheerful side. Two ships have arrived from the Orient. That’s welcome news, isn’t it? Two big freighters, just plain packed with manufactured articles from little factories in Japan and China, according to what I hear.”
The listening roomful of people stirred with excitement.
“And here’s a household tip from a food consultant in Hawaii,” Dangerfield said, but now his voice faded out; once more the listening people heard only static. June Raub turned up the volume, but it did no good. Disappointment showed clearly on all the faces in the room.
If Hoppy were here, she thought, he could tune it so much better than I can. Feeling nervous, she looked to her husband for support.
“Weather conditions,” he said, from where he sat in the first row of chairs. “We just have to be patient.”
But several people were glaring at her with hostility, as if it was her fault that the satellite had faded out. She made a gesture of helplessness.
The door of the Foresters’ Hall opened and three men awkwardly entered. Two were strangers to her and the third was the glasses man. Ill-at-ease, they searched for seats, whil
e everyone in the room turned to watch.
“Who are you fellows?” Mr. Spaulding, who operated the feed barn, said to them. “Did anyone say you could come in here?”
June Raub said, “I invited this delegation from Bolinas to make the trip up here and listen with us; their radio set is not working.”
“Shhh,” several people said, because once again the voice from the satellite could be heard.
“… anyhow,” Dangerfield was saying, “I get the pain mostly when I’ve been asleep and before I eat. It seems to go away when I eat, and that makes me suspect it’s an ulcer, not my heart. So if any doctors are listening and they have access to a transmitter, maybe they can give me a buzz and let me know their opinion. I can give them more information, if it’ll help them.”
Astonished, June Raub listened as the man in the satellite went on to describe in greater and greater detail his medical complaint. Was this what Hoppy meant? she asked herself. Dangerfield had turned into a hypochondriac and no one had noticed the transition, except for Hoppy whose senses were extra acute. She shivered. That poor man up there, doomed to go around and around the Earth until at last, as with the Russians, his food or air gave out and he died.
And what will we do then? she asked herself. Without Dangerfield… how can we keep going?
VIII
Orion Stroud, Chairman of the West Marin school board, turned up the Coleman gasoline lantern so that the utility school room in the white glare became clearly lit, and all four members of the board could make out the new teacher.
“I’ll put a few questions to him,” Stroud said to the others. “First, this is Mr. Barnes and he comes from Oregon. He tells me he’s a specialist in science and natural edibles. Right, Mr. Barnes?”
The new teacher, a short, young-looking man wearing a khaki shirt and work pants, nervously cleared his throat and said, “Yes, I am familiar with chemicals and plants and animal-life, especially whatever is found out in the woods such as berries and mushrooms.”
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