9 Tales of Space and Time

by Anthology

  In the hang-over that followed, he awaited her phone call. But when it did not come, and the hang-over passed, he decided to remain firm in his decision. Firmness became his modus operands. He delivered a firm speech before the Committee of Americans for America. He issued a firm and ringing statement of faith in the future of the film industry. He was firm with the writers preparing a screenplay for him, scolding them for being on page nineteen instead of page ninety. Firmness was the straw to which he clung. It was the whistle in his graveyard.

  But he longed for her. He hated the coming of night. He slept badly and ate little. He lost six pounds. His golf game fell to pieces. He fought off sudden impulses to buy her automobiles, mink coats, jewels. He drove through red lights and stop signs like a blind man, dreaming about her. He began taking sleeping pills, aspirins, Turns, Benzedrine. And at last he knew that he was pinning all his hopes on winning the Oscar for The Fall of Carthage. He no longer thought of this great accolade as a personal achievement or badge of merit, as he had for these many months. He now saw it only as a way of winning her back, of regaining her respect and admiration, her love.

  His heart jumped when he learned that he had won a nomination, and he began seeking her in all of their old haunts. He would walk into these places, looking lonely and sad, hoping she might be there and see him thus and be moved to pity him, to understand that in spite of his position and achievement he was after all a human being, a man who could be moved or hurt as well as the next one.

  He saw her several times, but she only glanced at him. Once she was with a wild-haired Armenian author, again with an Italian painter, and then with a defensive line-backer for the Detroit Lions. He was angered and tormented, but he kept a grip on himself and bided his time.

  At last the long-awaited night of the Academy Awards arrived and Cary sat in the audience, trembling in spite of the phenobarbital he had taken to quiet his nerves. When his name was called and thunderous applause broke out, he leaped from his seat and strode to the stage like a man in a trance. His forlorn hope was that she was there somewhere in the crowd, watching him. He took the shining Oscar and made a speech of acceptance, quiet, humble, and brief. He had worked on this for many sleepless midnights and thought it just the thing that might win her back. It posed him, in this supreme moment of triumph, as just a simple, humble man bereft of all affectation and pretense—a good and worthy and deserving human being.

  But she was not there. He learned why later at Romanoff’s where he anxiously sought her. He learned that she had gone deep-sea fishing at Mazatlan with a stuntman named Bud York.

  He got drunk. He got drunker than ever before in his life.

  He got in a fist fight with an actor noted for his night-club combats, and won a draw. Later he side-swiped three parked automobiles and was picked up by the police and booked on a 502, for operation of a motor vehicle while intoxicated. The next day he paid a five-hundred-dollar fine and through bleary eyes saw his name headlined in all the papers.

  It was a stunning disgrace.

  He did not go to the studio, but went straight from the City Hall to the Beverly Hills office of Davison Funck. There he sank into the deep, soft green chair and stared dismally at the benign face of the psychiatrist.

  Funck said calmly, “I haven’t seen you for a long time, but I have followed your career closely. You’ve done amazingly well.”

  “Haven’t I,” Cary muttered.

  “Are you out of pills?” Funck asked blandly.

  “I am out of my mind,” Cary said.

  “Tell me about it,” Funck said, and lighted his pipe.

  “I’ve lost her,” Cary said, as though he had gained the world only to lose his soul.

  Funck smiled at him with a kind of Olympian pity.

  “What have you done?” he asked.

  Cary whirled on him. “What have I done? I made her a star! I made her an actress. She is no longer just the creature of press agents.” He walked close to Funck. “What have I done? Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you know what has happened to me?”

  Funck smiled. “I have followed your ascension religiously,” he said. “It is my own accomplishment, as well as yours.”

  “What do you mean?” Cary asked, leaning his hands on the mahogany desk.

  “I gave you the great average mind,” Funck said gently. “It is die perfect equipment for the motion-picture producer. Whatever you create, that entertains you, will be entertaining to millions. Whatever you say that seems profound and good to you will seem so to millions. I made you a normal human animal, and what could be more delightful and sensible than that?”

  “I have never been so miserable in my life,” Cary said. “Without Arod none of it makes sense and it is something far short of delightful.”

  “She despises you?” Funck asked with a strange smile.

  “I’m dirt under her feet,” Cary said, and sank back into the deep green chair, a tortured man.

  Funck looked dreamily through the window. At last he said, “You will have to make a decision.”

  “Impossible,” Cary muttered.

  Funck ignored him and went on.

  “She has rejected your change of character,” he murmured. “In her way, she is a remarkable woman. She paid me a visit, knowing I was your friend. She told me of the monstrous thing you had become—that you had turned from a great poet into a sagacious pig, to a hypocritical monster. I did not tell her why, because I only betray my clients to themselves, not to others.” He sighed. “I had not anticipated this.”

  “Nonsense!” Cary said.

  “Not at all,” Funck said, “You must now decide. Either you get this girl out of your mind, or you get my pills out of your system. It is up to you.”

  Cary rose. “I know only one thing,” he said in utter misery, “I cannot live without her.”

  Funck extended his hand. “Give me the pills,” he said.

  Without a word Cary handed him the little cardboard box. Funck dropped them into the wastebasket. “You’ll be all right,” he said. He sighed again and smiled. “There is no way,” he said. “There is no way to make the world inhabitable.”

  The change in Francis Cary began slowly but gained momentum swiftly. He went about his usual concerns, sad with the loss of Arod, but grimly fulfilling his commitments. Then it began to happen. Listening to a group of executives discussing budget and exploitation for his own new picture, Cary suddenly burst out laughing. They stared at him in surprise and then one of them asked what the joke was.

  “The picture,” Cary said. “The picture is the joke.” He rose at the table and looked at them with contempt. “How is it possible, in a world like this,” he asked, “that five men like you, all rich and serious, old and sick, can foist such an obscenity on the innocent public of the United States? How much money do you need? How elegant do your funerals have to be?”

  He was met with the sudden breathless silence that confronts insanity. In the silence he turned and left the huge office.

  The next day it was all over town. There were a dozen theories trying to explain it. Cary had gone mad—for love, for ambition, for power. The president of the company, a quiet little man who looked like a gifted chipmunk, called him on the telephone and suggested that he take a vacation, a trip to Mexico or Italy, or a sea voyage. “Take one yourself,” Cary replied, “where the elephants die, or try a voyage to Mars.”

  That did it.

  Three days later Francis Cary was amongst the unemployed. Four days later he delivered a speech at an Optimists’ Club luncheon in Englewood, suggesting that these genial fellows disband and remove at least one dismal anachronism from the modern American culture. He was not lynched for this but was very firmly escorted to the door.

  The following day he rendered a verdict on the motion-picture business to a group of assembled newspapermen who drank his Scotch and Bourbon and listened with delight to his prognostications. That very night news stories and columns earned his dire predictions. MGM
would be turned into an immense bowling alley. Twentieth-Century Fox would once again become an oil field. Warner’s would be a riding academy, Paramount a psychiatric clinic for those driven mad by television. The business was doomed and the nation was doomed. Civilization was in extremis and perhaps the Bomb was the best solution.

  For days after this blast he went around the town, as in the old times, a patron of the second-class bistros. Three times he was punched for what he had said: twice by actors seeking publicity and once by a scenario writer who really resented what he had said—the man was already out of work and worried. He drew with one actor, lost the decision to the other, and scored an easy victory over the writer who, though a hothead, was very small.

  But he was ruined. The rats of Hollywood scurried down the gangplank of his sinking ship.

  He returned to his old studio apartment and rehung “The Beast of Alamogordo.” If he was not happy, he at least experienced a kind of bitter satisfaction. Probably no man holds greater love than for the child he had just whipped and so Cary, having castigated civilization publicly, began to feel a strange warmth for mankind. He felt it so keenly that he began work on a book. He phoned Davison Funck and asked the doctor to destroy his remaining wonder pills as a personal favor to human society.

  “They were nothing,” Funck said gently, “Only flour and sugar and the power of suggestion. I only enabled you to express yourself honestly. I freed you, temporarily, at least, from the pose you had created for yourself. No man can be completely a boob or a charlatan and be happy. He has to be a mixture of both. The redistribution of these ingredients is the sole function of psychiatry.”

  He hung up and it never occurred to Cary to wonder if he had lied about the make-up of the pills. Cary sat there for a long time and stared out the window at the boulevard below.

  He did not see the yellow Cadillac park at the curb but he heard the anxious knock at his door. Desperately hoping that it was she, he rushed to the door and opened it.

  Like a weeping goddess she stood there, gazing at him through splendid tears. After a brief moment he flung his arms about her and they held each other as though it was their last embrace with life itself. He shut his eyes ecstatically, inhaling her perfume. It was the first time he had ever held her in his arms.

  He could hear her saying, “I should never have doubted you, darling. I should have known you could never really change.”

  But for the first time in his life he realized what piffle and babble mere words can be. He swung her aloft in his arms and carried her triumphantly to the bed where all men begin and end. And there he discovered that all was still well with the world.

  RAYMOND J. HEALY

  7

  THE GREAT DEVON MYSTERY

  Your editor makes his first (and probably only) bow here as a science-fiction-fantasy writer. We felt that, inasmuch as we had asked a number of other editors to contribute to this frankly experimental volume, we ought to try to be part of the company, too, even though we realize full well that talented “old pros” like Boucher, Campbell, Gold, and McComas set far too swift a pace for such as we.

  So we settled for a burlesque—and a wildly mad one we think you will agree. We also hereby anticipate innumerable critics and admit jovially that our boufferie would undoubtedly be considered completely unpublishable elsewhere. So there!

  Most readers of Charles Fort should recall the amazing and still-unsolved affair of the tracks in the snow in Devon which were discovered by bewildered residents of that rustic English county on a February morning in the middle of the last century. The historicity of these markings is undeniable, incidentally, and they were found in an area covering many square miles. Many people actually believed that the devil himself had been walking, and locked themselves and their children in at night. Conflicting and startling reports and opinions were published widely, even the staid Times of London devoting much space to the affair. The episode ranks as one of the great unsolved mysteries of the ages and is still a choice subject for discussion amongst the cognoscenti of the marvelous and the strange.

  Readers wishing fuller details of this mystery than provided by our excerpts from Fort below can find a full treatment of it on pages 305, 306 ff. in his The Books of Charles Fort, published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., and with whose permission we reprint the excerpts.

  London Times, Feb. 16, 1855:

  Considerable sensation has been caused in the towns of Top sham, Lymphstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth and Dawlish, in Devonshire, in consequence of the discovery of a vast number of foot tracks of a most strange and mysterious description.

  “The story (we are quoting Fort) is of an incredible multiplicity of marks discovered in the morning of Feb. 8, 1855, in the snow, by the inhabitants of many towns and regions between towns . . . The tracks were in all kinds of unaccountable places: in gardens enclosed by high walls and up on the tops of houses, as well as in the open fields. There was in Lymphstone scarcely one unmarked garden. . . . The impression of the foot closely resembles that of a donkey’s shoe and measured from an inch and a half, in some instances, to two and a half inches across.

  “. . . At present it remains a mystery and many superstitious people of the above named towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors at night . . . a dangerous, degrading and false impression that it was the devil.”

  7

  THE GREAT DEVON MYSTERY

  LORD HUMPHREY MUFFIN PATTED DAISY’S PLUMP BUTTOCKS affectionately.

  “I guess I’ll ride her tonight, Huntington,” he said to the ostler. “She’s in need of the exercise. Be sure you rub Minnette and Jessie down, too,” he added. “It’s going to be jolly cold tonight.”

  “Very good, M’lord,” replied Huntington. “That I will. It’s colder than Job’s off ox right now, sir. The wind will have to change before this snow amounts to much.”

  Daisy was saddled and Huntington backed her from the stall, the plump, sleek mare dancing and whickering in joyous anticipation. Outside, the snow flurry was starting to trace new patterns on the Devon countryside and a pale, cold moon was snuggling into the heavy cloud blankets for the night.

  Muffin was given a hand as he struggled to the saddle. His high-heeled boots gave him five and a half feet, but he still had difficulty mounting a mare of Daisy’s size. His scarlet riding coat, fawn-colored breeches, and long, flowered silk muffler, though scarcely suitable for the occasion, evoked no comment from the stableman.

  “Please have a care, sir,” the ostler pleaded in concern. “They say the Old Nick himself is roaming the county these nights.”

  “Bosh, my good fellow,” smiled Muffin, “I’ve my pistols handy so don’t you worry about me . . . or the Old Nick either, for that matter. I can take care of us both!”

  “But those strange tracks, sir . . . the dogs wouldn’t follow them into the woods today. They howled and turned for home, really, sir.”

  “Nonsense,” said Muffin, “they were just confused. Too many damned fools have been tramping around here for the last few days looking for those silly tracks and the dogs were probably overexcited. Probably just rabbit tracks, anyhow. That’s what my fathead nephew Sir Chester says and he’s quite the huntsman, as you know. For once I’m willing to take the dunce’s opinion. Get to your work now.”

  He dug a spur into Daisy, who snorted and wheeled out into the stableyard.

  Lord Muffin was an eccentric. Despite the weather, he wore no covering on his egg-bald head, and snow flakes had already matted his heavy eyebrows and concealed the gray streaks in his long, flaming red Dundreary side whiskers. But such discomforts seemed to cause him no concern. He was intent, instead, about the matter of the strange tracks in the snow, about which he had just been somewhat dishonest with his employee. He had been dishonest for what he considered very good reasons and he brooded darkly about the matter as Daisy clopped happily along.

  Beauteous Queenie Broadaxe, mistress of the nearby Royal Coach Inn, probably held the key to the myst
ery and because of this he was suffering a torment of conflicting emotions. Incredulity, jealousy, apprehension, and the need for caution all plagued him constantly. As a Member of the House of Lords, he could ill afford publicity in this matter. But as one who suspected that he had been cuckolded in a fantastic and unbelievable fashion, he simply had to get to the bottom of the affair.

  Daisy shied as a hare raced across the road, almost unseating him. He quieted her expertly, then watched ruefully as the small, frightened creature disappeared in the adjacent field. Rabbit tracks, indeed! he thought. If it were only that simple!

  In London, just the previous day, he had consulted with Sir Flinders Tup well, the great private investigator, considered by many to have the finest intellect in all of England. Muffin had poured out many of his fears and suspicions to this great man, but the latter’s heavy schedule had not allowed Muffin time to tell all he knew or suspected. At Muffin’s insistent urging, however, Tupwell had agreed to come to Devon and study the phenomena at first hand. The two were to meet within the hour at the Royal Coach Inn.

  What a strange fellow this Tupwell was, Muffin thought. Brilliant, frequently temperamental, reticent, he had refused all sorts of high governmental positions. He rubbed elbows with the world’s mighty . . . but only when he chose. Where was it he was supposed to have come from? A small town in Wales? Ah yes, Pwllheli . . . or so someone had said recently. A man of mystery, really. But one of tremendous talents and ability who apparently chose to live in comparative obscurity when he might have been a great leader of men.

  Daisy shied again as a shadow flitted across her path. An owl, no doubt, thought Muffin . . . probably after the hare. Tupwell would be the owl in any game of hide and seek around here, he reflected, or the eagle would be a more statable term, he thought. It was hard to figure a man like that. He always seemed to do the questioning. A puzzling person who talked fluently with any number of foreign ambassadors and dignitaries in their own tongues, yet no one seemed to know where he had been to school. Muffin sighed and dismissed the man from his thoughts.