by Chad Oliver
There was no time to go home, and so a Foundation copter lifted them up into the desert air and carried them westward toward Los Angeles. They found themselves flinching involuntarily at the freight liners that roared through the air lanes and the flutter of copters that filled the sky like butterflies. Los Angeles was so vast and white and gleaming that they could hardly take it in. Far below them, dots on the calm blue Pacific, the surfaced subs bobbed like schools of porpoise.
The copter swung north along the coastline and then veered off to the right up Vandervort’s Canyon. They landed on the patio field of the huge estate and an old butler took them in tow.
They walked through the richly-carpeted hallways and up the marble stairs to the second floor. They walked down the long gray passage and knocked on the mahogany door.
A tiny green light blinked on in the center of the door.
Keith and Carrie entered the huge room, and it was almost like stepping from Earth to Venus. The hot, humid air boiled out into the hallway like an overflowing lake.
The room had not changed. The wall-to-wall brown rug was still there, and the tables and chairs and desks and fireplaces and flowers and books and drapes—
But the Old Man had changed.
Nineteen years had taken their toll.
Vandervort was one hundred and twenty-four years old.
Even the geriatrics specialists could not save him now.
The Old Man still sat in his huge, soft chair. He seemed very tiny now, and lost. His white beard was a dirty gray and his red face was blotched with unhealthy pink. His blue eyes were dull and glazed.
Ralph Nostrand stood by his side, his face lighting with a smile of welcome.
They shook hands.
“Who is it?” choked the Old Man. “Who’s there? Is somebody there?”
Keith leaned down toward him. “Van,” he said. “Van, it’s Keith Ortega.”
James Murray Vandervort stiffened as though an electric shock had shot through his thin, dry body. “Keith!” he wheezed. He tried to get up, but could not move. “Is it really you—after all these years?”
“Yes, Van.”
The dead blue eyes swam into focus. The Old Man breathed fast and shallow. “I have to know, Keith,” he said. His voice was weak, a shadow of the boom that had once filled the chamber and chased the darkness away. “It’s been, so hard. I have to know.”
Keith waited him out, feeling a vast pity for the wreck of a human being that was dying in the big soft chair. Pity—and something more than that.
“I had to hear you say it, say it with your own voice,” Vandervort said, talking very fast. His voice was such a whisper that Keith could hardly hear him. “Is everything all right? Is it working, Keith? Is it working?”
Keith made himself speak slowly and clearly. “You don’t need to worry, Van. It’s all right. Everything is all right. All the colonies are working just as we planned. Nothing can go wrong now. The new culture of Venus will come through space to Earth within a century. The new culture pattern will hit the Earth like a shot in the am. We’ll go on to the stars one day, Van. Everything is all right.”
“I gave them the stars,” the Old Man said, his voice very tired. “I gave them the stars, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Keith said.
The Old Man sank back into his chair in sudden, exhausted relaxation. The old, dead eyes closed.
There was a long, hushed silence.
“Is he all right?” Ralph asked.
“I think so.”
The Old Man began to talk again, his voice far away and lonely. “I’ve covered my tracks,” he whispered, “but not too well. When the new world comes out of space, the people of Earth will check back … check back—”
The voice trailed away.
“Yes, Van?” Keith urged.
The Old Man sighed. “The people will check back. They’ll find my name, find the records. They’ll know I did it. They’ll know, they’ll know—”
Again, the thin voice faded.
The Old Man began to cry, softly. Keith leaned closer to hear him. Suddenly the Old Man tried to straighten in his chair and the faded blue eyes opened.
“Keith, Keith,” he whispered desperately, “will they remember me after I’m gone? I gave them the stars. Keith, will they remember my name? Will they remember my name?”
The deep shadows of the vast, crammed room rustled around the walls, sliding in toward the firelight. Keith and Carrie and Ralph stood in the unnatural heat and stared at the tiny, dying man in the huge, swallowing chair.
“They’ll remember you, Van,” Keith said. “They’ll remember you long after the rest of us are a million years forgotten.”
James Murray Vandervort smiled. The blue eyes closed again. “Remember me,” he mumbled. “Remember my name. Remember my name—”
A doctor came in from the back door.
“You’d better go now,” he said. “Mr. Vandervort needs to rest.”
They walked out of the chamber, down the hallway, down the marble stairs.
“All that,” Ralph Nostrand said. “All that, just to keep a part of him alive.”
“He had no son,” Carrie said quietly.
They walked toward the copter in the patio. Keith was thinking of Halaja, and the dark log buildings in the gray-green jungles of another world.
All that because a rich old man was afraid of the eternal dark.
“All that,” he said, “because he was just a man.”
Very late that night the three of them walked singing past the bright lights of Wilshire Walk.
A man and his wife, who had carried out an Old Man’s plan.
A captain in a forgotten service, who had falsified a report to make a dream come true.
The violet government airsign hung in the air; DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
They walked through the sign.
They walked on, arm in arm, singing under the frost of stars. They walked on and all who saw them that night on Earth wondered at the smiles they smiled and the strange, strange song they sang—
A song that whispered beyond the clouds—
Beyond the rains that cool our skies.
Beyond … beyond …
TRANSFORMER
Our town is turned off now, all gray and lazy, so this seems like a good time to begin.
Let’s not kid ourselves about it, Clyde—I know what you’re thinking. I don’t blame you. You’re thinking there’s nothing from one wall to the other that’s as completely and thoroughly boring as some motherly old dame gushing about the One Hundred and One fugitives from Paradise which are to be found in Her Home Town. A real insomnia killer, that’s what you’re thinking. A one-bell monologue.
Suppose we get things straight, right from the start.
I may look like one of those sweet little old ladies who spend all their time in the kitchen slipping apple preserves to bleary-eyed children, but I can’t help what I look like, and neither can you. I never set foot in a kitchen in my life, and of course there aren’t any kids in our town—not physically, anyway. I don’t say I’m the most interesting gal you ever met, Clyde, but I’ll tell you for sure you never yakked with anyone like me before.
Now, you take our town. If you want it straight, it’s the damnedest place you ever heard of. It stinks, but we can’t get out. ELM POINT is the name on the station, that’s what we have to call it, but it’s as crazy as the rest of the place. There’s no point in ELM POINT, and the only trees I ever saw are made out of sponge rubber.
You might stick around for a minute and listen, you see—things might get interesting.
One more thing we might as well clear up while we’re at it. I can hear you thinking, with that sophisticated mind of yours: “Who’s she supposed to be telling the story to? That’s the trouble with all these first-person narratives.” Well, Clyde, that’s a dumb question, if you ask me. Do you worry about where the music comes from when Pinza sings in a lifeboat? I feel sorry for you, I really do. I’l
l tell you the secret: the music comes from a studio orchestra that’s hidden in the worm can just to the left of the Nazi spy. You follow me? The plain, unvarnished truth is that I get restless when the town’s turned off for a long time. I can’t sleep. I’m talking to myself. I’m bored stiff, and so would you be if you had to live here for your whole life. But I know you’re there, Clyde, or this wouldn’t be getting through to you. Don’t worry about it, though.
This is strictly for kicks.
Okay, so let’s have some details. I live in a town that’s part of the background for a model railroad. Maybe you think that’s funny, but did you ever live in a subway? I want to be absolutely clear about this—you’re a little dense sometimes, Clyde. I don’t mean that ELM POINT is a town that’s located on a big railroad that’s operated in an exemplary, model manner. No. I mean I live on a model railroad, a half-baked contraption that’s set up in a kid’s attic. The kid’s name is Willy Roberts, he’s thirteen years old, and we don’t think he’s a god that created our world. In fact, if you want my opinion, Willy is a low-grade moron, and a sadist to boot.
So my world is on a big plywood table in an attic. My town is background atmosphere for a lousy electric train. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. A motherly old soul glimpsed through a house window, I guess. An intimate detail. It gives me a pain.
If you think it’s fun to live in a town on a model railroad, you’ve got rocks in your head.
Look at it from our point of view. In the first place, ELM POINT isn’t a town at all—it’s a collection of weird buildings that Willy Roberts and his old man took a fancy to and could afford. It isn’t even sharp for a model railroad town; the whole thing is disgustingly middle class.
Try to visualize it: there’s a well in the middle of the table, a hole for Willy Roberts to get into when he works the transformer and the electric switches. The whole southern end of the table is covered with a sagging mountain made of chicken wire and wet paper towels. The western side has got a bunch of these sponge rubber trees I was telling you about, and just beyond them is an empty area called Texas. There are some real dumb cows there and two objectionable citizens who come to our town every Saturday night and try to shoot up the place. The Ohio River starts in the northwestern corner of the table and flows into the southeast, where I guess it makes a big drop to the floor. (No one has ever gone over to look.) Our town and a mountain take up the northern end of the table and part of the eastern side. That’s where I live, as a matter of fact—on the eastern side, between the Ohio River and the water tower.
Now catch this building inventory, Clyde—it’ll kill you. We’ve got a police station and a firehouse in North Flats, at the edge of the mountain where the tunnel comes out. There’s a big tin railroad station with a red roof. There’s a quaint old frame hotel that was left over from the Chicago Fire, and right behind it there’s this diner that was supposed to look like an old street-car. There’s one gas station with three pumps, but no cars. There’s a big double spotlight on a tin tower right across from my house; I have to wear dark glasses all the time. There’s seven lower-class frame houses with dirty white curtains in the windows; Humphery and I live in of them. Humphery—that’s my husband, or would be if Willy Roberts had thought to put a preacher in this hole—works in the tin switchman’s house up the tracks. Whenever one of those damned trains comes by he has to goose-step out and wave his stupid red lantern. Clyde, he hates it. Then there’s a cattle pen on a siding, with no wind to blow the smell away, if you get what I mean.
That’s about it—a real Paradise.
Willy’s got two trains on the table now. One is a flashy passenger job stashed full of stuck-up aristocrats—you know, the kind who are always reading the Times when they go through your town. The other is a freight train that doesn’t carry anything; it just grinds around the track like a demented robot, and its only job, as far as I can tell, is to shuttle itself onto a siding and look respectful when the passenger train full of city slickers hisses by. As if all this racket weren’t enough, Willy’s got him a switch engine too, and he keeps it in our front yard. It’s got a bell.
There’s more, too, but we’ll get to that.
How do you like our town, Clyde? Interesting? I want to tell you something else: our town is planning to commit a murder.
Guess who.
You just stick around awhile.
You know, our town is all gray and lazy when the current isn’t on, just like I said. Nobody’s got much energy; I must be just about the only one awake in ELM POINT at night. It gets pretty lonesome.
But the door to the attic is opening now and here comes Willy the Kid. Hang on, Clyde—all hell will pop loose in a minute. You’ll have to excuse me for a minute; I have to wake Humphery up and get him down to his tin house. It’s terrible—you almost have to dent Humphery to wake him up like this. And for what? Every time he wakes up he has to go to that damfool switchman’s house and make with the red lantern.
Fine thing. Well, I’ll be back later. And say, Clyde, if you ever see this Willy character, tell him not to shake the whole lousy table when he drags his body into the well, will you?
Willy Roberts surveyed his model railroad without pleasure. He could remember the time when it had given him a real boot, but after all he was thirteen years old now. He felt slightly ashamed that he should want to mess with it at all, but it was better than getting kicked around in football by all the big guys in the neighborhood. And Sally had said she was going to the show with Dave Toney, damn her.
Willy clicked on the transformer rheostat and watched the lights come on.
He knocked with his knuckles on the blue tin roof of the switchman’s house. “Let’s get with it, Humphery boy,” he said. He always called the switchman Humphery—always had, ever since he was a kid and had carried on long friendly conversations with the switchman. Boy, what a creep he had used to be! “Come on, Humph, or I’ll tear your arm off. Whadaya want, boy—time and a half for overtime? Union shop? On the ball—here comes the Black Express, full of FBI agents after the atom spies….”
He pressed the “start” button and the passenger train slipped its wheels on the tracks and picked up speed. It zipped by the switchman’s shack, and out came Humphery with his red lantern, right on schedule. “What a brain you got, Humph,” Willy said. “Boy, you’re a genius.” He speeded up the passenger train and sent it careening through the tunnel into ELM POINT. He blew the whistle. He made artificial black smoke pour out of the locomotive’s smokestack.
Willy waited until the Black Express had got by the siding and wavered into the end mountain tunnel, and then he sent his freight chugging out of the cattle pen onto the main line. He sent that rattling through ELM POINT, tweaking old Humphery’s cap when he jerked out with his lantern, and then stopped it on the bridge over the Ohio River. He clapped his hands together.
The Black Express charged full speed across Texas, knocking a cow off the track, and ploughed full-tilt into the stalled freight on the bridge. Both engines jumped the track and landed in the cellophane of the Ohio River. One little man fell out of the caboose and got caught under a wheel.
Willy grinned.
“Pretty good, hey Humphery?” he said.
He cut the power for a second, righted the trains, and set them in reverse to see how fast they would go. Then he ran the freight back onto a siding and began to send the Black Express backwards and forwards over the switch, so he could watch old Humphery dart in and out of his tin shack waving his lantern like a demon.
“Get with it, Humphery,” cried Willy. “You only live once!”
Humphery didn’t say anything, Willy noticed.
Too busy, probably.
Well, now you’ve met our lord and master, Clyde. A real All American Junior. I tell you, ELM POINT is a madhouse when that kid is in the attic. It’s bad enough on the rest of us, but it’s killing Humphery.
Things have settled down a little at the moment. The freight is sitting in
the siding by the cow pen, and Willy’s got the passenger job on automatic. Once every 47 seconds it comes yelling and smoking through my side-yard, and five seconds later poor Humphery has to stagger out and wave his red lantern at the snobs in the club car.
The spotlights are on, too, but Willy hasn’t turned off the light in the ceiling yet, so it isn’t too bad. Willy’s sitting in the well reading a sex magazine, so I guess he won’t be wrecking any more trains for a while.
Maybe you wonder what will happen to the man who fell out of the caboose in the wreck. More likely, you don’t care. But I’ll tell you his name: Carl. None of us have any last names. Carl’s too busted up to fix, so Willy will throw him in the wastebasket. Tender, isn’t it? It chokes you all up with sentiment. We’ll sort of have a funeral for Carl after the town gets turned off again, if we can stay awake, and you know what we’ll be thinking? We’ll be thinking that’s the end of the road for all of us here in ELM POINT—the wastebasket.
It’s a great life. You’d love our town, Clyde.
Let me tell you about our town, Clyde. It’s different when the current’s turned on. You’d hardly know the old dump, believe me.
Everybody has to go through the proper motions, you see? Like poor old Humphery with his lantern. There’s Patrick, the cop, out in front of the police station. He just stands there blowing his tin whistle like he was Benny Goodman or somebody. Inside, they’ve got this one prisoner, name of Lefty. He’s never been outside a cell; I don’t know what he’s supposed to have done. Then there’s a joker over at the firehouse. All he’s done for the last seven years is slide up and down this silly pole. Maybe you think he isn’t sore at night.
Every one that can rushes around like mad when the current’s on. It’s the only time we’re really active and feeling good, do you see? We can’t add anything to what’s already here in ELM POINT, but we can use what we’ve got as long as Willy can’t see us. Some of us, like poor Humphery or the policeman, have to work when the current’s on, because that’s their job. But some others, the background characters, can sneak off and visit once in a while. The favorite place is inside the hollow mountain. You’d be surprised at what goes on in there, Clyde.
