Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  Big Louis stopped dead and smiled a winsome smile. “Reel it out again, men!” he shouted.

  As Will Kiley struggled manfully with the golden chain and its golden disc, two rumpled figures wearing thick glasses paused beside him. They ignored him, but pointed frequently at the head of the dead beast:

  “The chief difference in the pterodactyl skull from that of a bird is in the way in which the malar arch is prolonged backward on each side,” said the first.

  “The nostrils are unusually large. Could it be Dimorphodon?” asked the second.

  “Don’t be a silly goose, Trenchard,” replied the first. “Doesn’t even resemble.”

  Trenchard’s eyes flashed anger and his mouth tightened. “Damn’s blood, Goilvey! You were the one who said this genus shouldn’t be this heavy. You were the one who dragged me out of the Automat, leaving a perfectly good fish cake, just to come down here and argue about this. I don’t know why it’s so big, and I don’t know why it’s so heavy…all I know is that I don’t like you talking to me so snottily. Your seniority in the department doesn’t give you the right to…”

  A civil rights group, attracted by the noise, abandoned their labors integrating a parking lot, and instantly interpreting what was going on there in the intersection, whipped out magic markers and fresh cardboard, and rejingo’d their slogans. They began parading around and around the dead beast, bearing signs that read HE DIED FOR US! and DONT LET THIS DEATH GO UNAVENGED! and SOCIETY ASKS: WHY?

  “Looks dead to me,” murmured a secretary, walking to Sak’s with a girl friend.

  “Remind me to make an appointment with my orthodontist,” her friend replied.

  A representative of the sanitation workers union—summoned by enraged members of his local—arrived on the scene, and uttered a snarl. “Like hell we will!” he commented to the members of the press. “It’ll lay there till hell freezes over! If the corrupt and Commie-Symp government of this city thinks it is going to fatten and batten on the blood and sweat and tears of the members of the United Sanitation Workers of America Local #337, it has another think coming. The name is Fortnoy. F-O-R-T…”

  The two CIA men ran out of film. One’s tie-tack camera clicked on empty spools, and the others mini-corder in his hatband whirred emptily. They met at mid-pteranodon and compared notes:

  “Maoist?”

  “Doubtful. Castroite?”

  “Maybe. Reach the office yet?”

  “No, something’s wonking up the circuits.”

  “Jamming?”

  “Maybe. Maoist?”

  “Doubtful. Russkie?”

  “Maybe…”

  Kiley pulled and strained at the disc, trying to drag it out from under the great head. He was making some small headway when a photographer and three models and the director of fashion for a leading women’s magazine nudged him aside, and began posing the girls on the head of the dead beast.

  “Look anguished, Maddie,” said the photographer, a slim and ascetic young man wearing an Australian digger hat in white velour. The model looked anguished. “No, no, more anguished. Cry for the entire world, sweetheart!” Maddie anguished harder. She cried. “Now tilt the pelvis just a tiddle forward, darling,” the photographer urged. “Let’s transmute that anguish into a starchy impudence at the really tasty things the season’s culottes have to say to the New Female!”

  “Off duty,” said a cabbie, streaking down around a wing-tip and plunging up the Avenue.

  Somewhere children were laughing and the wind was sweet with the scent of imminent Summer. But that was somewhere else.

  “Jesus, I can’t stand the stink!” shouted a woman from the seventh floor window of an employment agency.

  Seventeen sailors from a Japanese freighter, in New York on three-day leave, crouched near the juncture of wing and torso, and snapped pictures of the dead beast with Leicas, several murmuring words that sounded like, “Rodan.” No one paid them any heed.

  Several handbills were hastily pasted onto the leathery hide, announcing the candidacy of Roger Scarpennetti for Borough President.

  A vendor of socks (seconds) pitched his way from tail to beak, and made almost four dollars with his wares.

  Three agile and rolling-gaited Caughnawaga Indians, those last noble descendants of the noblest of noble savages, crossed 48th Street heading downtown. They carried lunch pails. They were on their way home by IRT subway (which they would catch at 42nd & Times Square) from the building site construction on Madison and 48th; the selfsame construction site toward which four Pelham Privateers (behind the point-scouting of the redoubtable Vimmy) at this moment were streaking. The three redskins, high-steel workers of the most loftily-paid species, paused at the corner of 47th and Sixth, shifted lunch pails, and clucked their tongues almost in unison.

  “Is that crummy, I ask you!” said Walter Knife-That-Gleams-In-Starlight.

  “Yeah, first they zap alla the buffalo, bison, whatever the hell they was that they did in, and now this!” The lament was voiced by Teddy Bearclaw.

  “Goddam white-eyes,” added Sidney G. Nine Fires.

  “Red man’s burden,” said Walter.

  “Is it not a sad pass what our people has come to, that we must erect for these shitty crummy pony soldiers a edifice of such nobility as we are at this precise moment in time erecting,” penultimated Teddy.

  “What the hell is a bison?” asked Sidney G. Nine Fires. Mutual shrugs of confusion led to a prompt exit.

  The Reverend Leroy L. Beal, arriving at the head of the Poke County, Mississippi, delegation to the First Annual Congress of the International Evangelical Brotherhood for the Promotion of Christian Love and Low Down Payments, paused, waving his flock to a halt, shaking his head sadly at the vast obstruction blocking the intersection ahead. His second-in-command moved up beside him. Together, they studied the crumpled, strutted, awning-winged apparition filling the street.

  “Well, Leroy, what do you make of it?” the lieutenant inquired.

  Rev. Beal sighed. “The expenditure of funds and ingenuity that went into constructing this hoax and placing it in our line of march could have supported three indigent families in fair comfort for a period of at least two months,” he stated.

  The two men advanced; Rev Beal poked at the leathery hide with a finger.

  “Plastic,” he said. “A transparent fraud.”

  “As I see it, Leroy, they intended to suspend the thing from wires and have it buzz us. But apparently the wires broke.”

  “Obviously. Tsk. Sometimes I wonder at the curious picture the opposition seems to entertain of our gullibility. First the whole thing with the sheets over their heads; now this: big racist rubber chickens.”

  “So—what do we do?”

  “We make ourselves comfortable,” The Reverend said. “And wait.”

  As the strains of We Shall Overcome rose on the afternoon air, a party of lobbyists for the All-American Society for the Preservation of Property Values (ASPPV) emerged from the gloom of Reilly’s Bar and Grille, summoned by the mingled cries of the wounded, the chatter of the spectators, and the exhortations of the cop, still in search of a recipient for the summons. The group blinked at the scene, noting the size and placement of the reptile with eyes accustomed to lightning assessment.

  “By George, Charlie,” the head lobbyist said, around a cigar, “you couldn’t replace that thing for under twenty-eight-five or I’m a baboon’s nephew.”

  Charlie was staring at the singers grouped by the monster’s stern.

  “Tell me there’s no Commie money behind them Nigras,” he murmured.

  Lilya looked at her watch for the thirty-first time. Ten more minutes and not a second more, and then by God she’d take a cab to Schrafft’s and order the expensivist item on the menu and if that skin-disease Melville ever dared to show that collection of acne scars he called a face again—

  “Sorry, lady,” the man with the leather jacket said, not looking at Lilya as he bellied her aside. He planted his
feet and looked the project over, from beak to tail-tip and back to beak.

  “Hey, Jake,” a wiry man in overalls said. “You want I should get the rig in position?”

  “Nix,” Jake said succinctly.

  “Right,” the wiry man said. “This is outta our line—”

  Jake whirled and grabbed a handful of the wiry man’s overall bib.

  “There ain’t no wrecking job Ajax Wrecking can’t handle and doncha forget it,” he growled. “Hold the headache ball. Tell the boys to break out the chain saws.”

  “Sure, Jake. Only you got aholt of the hair on my chest—”

  “Twenny minutes, that’s what the dude said. I don’t want to see nothing but hip pockets and elbows until we get this intersection clear, get me?”

  A husband and wife team, tourists from Joplin, Missouri, making one of their rare p.a.’s in the Apple, stood near the forearm and metacarpus of the dead beast, the husband setting the automatic timer on his camera. Then he strolled nonchalantly to his spouse (indicating his ease and familiarity with matters photographic), struck an attitude, and waited, smiling, till the camera had clicked them off. “Do we have time to make it down to the Village for some shots with hippies, before dinner?” the wife asked. Her husband’s answer was lost on the wind as the mayor’s helicopter settled in the center of Sixth Avenue, just above 47th Street.

  The riot police jog-trotted around the corner of 48th and Sixth and began breaking up into assault teams.

  “Careful of that Mace!” Captain Schirmer bellowed through the bullhorn. Snipers in office windows began firing at streetlights. “All right, move it out!” shouted Captain Schirmer. The first wave of riot police lobbed their tear gas grenades, and began spraying high pressure hoses down the Avenue. The rabbinical students fled, still uncertain whether the pteranodon was kosher or trayfe—but dead certain the eggs were edible if the proper bruchah was said over them. The rescue squads pulled the last of the survivors out from under the dead beast, and carried them away from the line of combat.

  Kiley was trapped at the neck of the creature, still trying to yank loose the garden amulet. He was cut off from escape by the insurrecting Columbia Law students and Black Panther Freedom Party members on the eastern flank, by the riot police using Mace and lead-weighted truncheons on the west, by the roughneck warriors of the Ajax Wrecking Corporation (all ex-Seabees) on the North, and by the advancing wave of members of the Amalgamated Butchers and Meat Hackers Local #39 on the South. He crouched down, hoping to go unseen, and continued yanking at the circle of gold.

  More police on horseback clogged the scene, trying to aid their beat partner in establishing to whom the corpse in the street belonged. The ticket was written, it merely needed to be served.

  Three hookers began working the uptown side of 47th Street, hoping some of the show biz crowd would stick to their fingers, or other portions of their anatomy.

  “Oh!” cried Alice, awakening, “apparently it is all a dream!”

  “You’re under arrest,” said the cop with the ticket, to no one in particular. He said it again, softer, but no one paid any attention.

  Lilya curse/wished plagues on gnats and nits on the acne-pocked head of Melville, and stalked off down the Avenue, passing the hip-girdle of the pteranodon, failing to look down where she would have seen her much-cursed Melville, much more crushed than cursed.

  Near the hind limbs of the dead beast (what George “The Pot” Lukovich would have referred to as the assend), twelve members of The Pelham Privateers now worked diligently trying to get the beast erect so its hubcaps could be stolen. The pneumatic jacks they had installed merely sank into the flesh of the beast.

  Big Louis Morono, seeing the gang at work, whistled up his men, and using the high pressure hoses, drove the juvies from the scene.

  It is at this point that the two collaborators, Messrs. Laumer and Ellison, part company in their estimation of what the attached story should be. Having worked together with skill and amicable verve for the first 4000 words, they felt that the creative ardor of neither should be dampened by either’s attempts to steer the story in a concluding direction offensive to the other. Therefore, the authors offer 2 COMPLETE ENDINGS 2. Count ’em! 2 for the price of one. First, Ellison. Second, Laumer.

  Proceed…

  Ending the First

  Even as they fled, the Pelham Privateers indicated their frustration at having been thwarted. They mugged Trenchard and Goilvey where they stood, leaving the two tottering scientists even more tottered: face-down in the gutter, arguing through split lips and cracked teeth, “It’s too big to be a pterodactyl from our past…it has to be from the past, you twit…no, it’s from another planet…don’t be an ass, they don’t have pterodactyls on any planet in our solar system…so it came from another solar system…how did it get here…that’s not my problem…”

  Will Kiley struggled with the golden amulet.

  And at that precise moment, the parallel worlds, having reached the apogee of their pendulum swings, and having started back toward the point at which they touched originally (for the first time in fifty-six years), met…perigee…merged…

  And Will Kiley, tightly attached to the focal point of the two world’s merging—the golden amulet—found himself poof!

  Gone. Vanished.

  In the intersection of Sixth Avenue and 47th Street, the mob was cleared away, and the Ajax Wreckers joined with their working-class comrades of the Amalgamated Butchers and Meat Hackers Local #39, to rid the streets of the unsightly corpse of a flying reptile that had dropped from no one knew where…and no one seemed to very much care…

  Meanwhile, back at the tangential meeting-place of the parallel worlds…

  Very much like a dead ibari, the man fell out of the sky at X.O. + 19 of a Bluemorn, fell howling, arms and legs all a-tumble, landing squarely in the moss-and-metal center of the Religious Icon of Nerf, in Avuncular Square.

  Two leathery-winged residents flapped over to the gigantic creature, and stared at it.

  “Did it fly?” said the first, scratching its osseous crest with a wingtip finger. “Or did it merely fall?”

  “Big, isn’t it?” commented the second. “Much bigger than whatchamacallit, men, are supposed to be. And heavier. I wonder, is it edible?”

  “Ah-ha, not is it edible,” interjected one of the dietary priests of Nerf, “but is it hazzil! That’s the question!”

  “It looks hazzil.”

  “The eyes are blue, that means it can’t be hazzil!”

  A Proctor descended on the scene and extracted its demerit book from its wingtip-pouch with the fingertip of its other wing. “Okay, who owns this myth?”

  “What’s a Teeny Slut?” asked the dietary priest of Nerf.

  But no one seemed to know.

  And no one seemed to very much care…

  THE END (maybe)

  And Now, Go on to the

  Senses-Shattering 2nd

  Ending by Keith Laumer

  Ending the Second

  The Vice-President in charge of Enforcement for the meat cutters confronted Jake, Ajax Wreckers’ ace field man, as the latter tugged at a twenty-foot length of amputated pterodactyl skin.

  “Hey,” he barked over the stutter of the chain saws chopping through the lobster-like flesh. “You guys are doing our work!”

  Jake dropped the leg, causing a gush of blood like drained oil to moisten the shoe-tops of the union man. He took a step toward the challenger, pushed his large, broken-veined, fist-scarred, unevenly shaved face forward.

  “Oh, yeah?” he riposted.

  As they stood nose to nose, their followers gathered behind them. A chain saw barked and sputtered, lugging down on bone. More large men appeared. The lines formed up across the slope of the pteranodon’s keel. An advance scout from the Black Panthers sidled up to a dark-skinned butcher who stood glowering at a similarly pigmented wrecker.

  “Hey, baby,” he protested. “Let’s not waste no horsepower on internecine
strife. Let’s get Honky!”

  “Now, boys,” the Rev. Beal interrupted.

  “Who you calling ‘boy,’ Uncle Tom?” the Black Panther inquired threateningly. He gave the small, neatly suited ecclesiast a push with a hangnailed forefinger. Charles W. Throckwall of the ASPPV noted the interchange from the corner of his eye.

  “See here, fellow,” he blurted. “That’s a man of the cloth you’re pushing—”

  “Stop, thief!” a skinny female in a fantastic hat yelled. Will Kiley, bounding pop-shopward with the golden amulet, skidded on the oily blood and caromed into Throckwall, who rebounded in what appeared to be a leap toward the Panther. The latter withdrew for reinforcements, jostling a meatcutter. The meatcutter threw the unfortunate chap at Jake, who replied by placing two short jabs in the lower belt region of the policeman just as the uniformed minion thrust the summons at him. Whistles sounded the charge. Union men slugged it out with wreckers and militant sociologists. Christians and Realtors battled side by side. Big Louis Morono played his hoses over all parties without discrimination due to race, creed, or national origin.

  “By George, Charlie,” the real estate lobby chief called to his aide. “Maybe we’d better rethink our program. They’ve got quite a body of public opinion on their side, it appears!”

  “We can’t fight this kind of organization,” Charlie agreed. “We better pull back and regroup.”

  “Leroy,” the Rev. Beal’s lieutenant shouted in his leader’s ear. “Possibly we misjudged the magnitude of the backlash—”

  “Hey, boss,” Jake’s aide cried over the tumult. “We only got ten minutes to finish the job, which Ajax’s rep is riding on the outcome!”

  Jake grunted and strained chest to chest with the union Enforcer.

  “Deal?” he muttered tentatively.

  “How’s about if your boys do the primary breakdown and my guys take it from there? And kind of get your thumb outta my eye, OK?”

  “Check. And my groin ain’t a place for you to store your knee when you ain’t using it, right?”