Collected Short Fiction, page 17
He dialed. The bartender’s tired face appeared in the screen.
“Hello, Sam,” the barkeep said. “What’s doing?”
“Do me a favor, Jerry,” Sam said. “Look around your place for Ginger.”
“She ain’t here, Sam,” the bartender said. “Haven’t seen her since you two blew out of here a while back.” Jerry’s eyes narrowed. “I ain’t never seen you dressed up like that before, Sam, you know?”
Gaius Titus crouched down suddenly to get out of range of the screen. “I’m celebrating tonight, Jerry,” he said, and broke the connection.
Ginger wasn’t to be found either, eh? That left only Sharon. He couldn’t call Kavanaugh’s—they wouldn’t give a caller any information about their patrons. Grabbing another taxi, he shot across town to Kavanaugh’s.
Sharon wasn’t there when Schuyler entered. She hadn’t been in since the afternoon, a waiter informed him, after receiving a small gratuity. Schuyler had a drink and left. Gaius Titus returned to his apartment, tingling with an excitement he hadn’t known for centuries.
He returned to Kavanaugh’s the next night, and the next. Still no sign of her.
The following evening, though, when he entered the bar, she was sitting there, nursing an old-fashioned. He slid onto the seat next to her. She looked up in surprise.
“Bill! Good to see you again.”
“The same here,” Gaius Titus said. “It’s good to see you again—Ginger. Or is it Lorraine?”
She paled and put her hand to her mouth. Then, covering, she said, “What do you mean, Bill? Have you had too many drinks tonight?”
“Possibly,” Titus said. “I stopped off in the San Marino before I came up. You weren’t there, Lorraine. That deep voice is quite a trick, I have to admit. I had a drink with Mack and Corwyn, Then I went over to the East End, Ginger. You weren’t there; either. So,” he said, “there was only one place left to find you, Sharon.”
She stared at him for a long moment. Finally she said, simply, “Who are you?”
“Leslie MacGregor,” Titus said. “Also Sam Spielman. And W. M. Schuyler. Plus two or three other people. The name is Gaius Titus Menenius, at your service.”
“I still don’t understand—”
“Yes, you do,” Titus said. “You are clever—but not clever enough. Your little game had me going for almost a month, you know? And it’s not easy to fool a man my age.”
“When did you find out?” the girl asked weakly.
“Monday night, when I saw all three of you within a couple of hours.”
“You’re—”
“Yes. I’m like you,” he said. “But I’ll give you credit: I didn’t see through it until I was on my way home. You were using my own camouflage technique against me, and I didn’t spot it for what it was. What’s your real name?”
“Mary Bradford,” she said. “I was English, originally. Of fine Plantagenet stock. I’m really a Puritan at heart, you see.” She was grinning slyly.
“Oh? Mayflower descendant?” Titus asked teasingly.
“No,” Mary replied. “Not a descendant. A passenger. And I’ll tell you—I was awfully happy to get out of England and over here to Plymouth Colony.”
He toyed with her empty glass. “You didn’t like England? Probably my fault. I was a minor functionary in King James’ court in the early seventeenth century.”
They giggled together over it. Titus stared at her, his pulse pounding harder and harder. She stared back. Her eyes were smiling.
“I didn’t think there was another one,” she said afer a while. “It was so strange, never growing old. I was afraid they’d burn me as a witch. I had to keep changing, moving all the time. It wasn’t a pleasant life. It’s better lately—I enjoy these little poses. But I’m glad you caught on to me,” she said. She reached out and took his hand. “I guess I would never have been smart enough to connect you and Leslie and Sam, the way you did Sharon and Ginger and Lorraine. You play the game too well for me.”
“In two thousand years,” Titus said, not caring if the waiter overheard him, “I never found another one like me. Believe me, Mary, I looked. I looked hard, and I’ve had plenty of time to search. And then to find you, hiding behind the faces of three girls I knew!”
He squeezed her hand. The next statement followed logically for him. “Now that we’ve found each other,” he said softly, “we can have a child. A third immortal.”
Her face showed radiant enthusiasm. “Wonderful!” she cried. “When can we get married?”
“How about tomor—” he started to say. Then a thought struck him.
“Mary?”
“What . . . Titus?”
“How old did you say you were? When were you born?” he asked.
She thought for a moment. “1597,” she said. “I’m nearly four hundred.”
He nodded, dumb with growing frustration. Only four hundred? That meant—that meant she was now the equivalent of a three-year-old child!
“When can we get married?” she repeated.
“There’s no hurry,” Titus said dully, letting her hand drop. “We have eleven hundred years.”
THE END
No Future In This
What was the meaning of the blurred and multiple images in the screen? Why did they shift so often, and occasionally disappear?
THE REVEREND Sean Aloysius Riley, D.D., Ph, D.S. J. smiled contentedly at the massive brown-bound ledger in front of him as he totted up the last of a column of figures and double-checked them. He set down the final total in his neat, austere hand and his smile grew broader.
“Exactly two hundred fifty-six million, three hundred ninety-four thousand, eight hundred and two dollars.” he said out loud, in his most sonorous, rolling tones. He repeated the figure a second time, even more resonantly.
There was no one else in the office to hear him, but Father Riley liked the way the words sounded. They reverberated nicely in his small study.
Chuckling amiably to himself, he put the ledger inside a desk drawer, placing it carefully over the latest copy of the Daily Racing Form, locked the drawer securely, and returned the key to the zipper pocket in his cassock.
He leaned back in his chair, picked up his breviary, and contemplated its rich quarter-morocco binding for a moment. Then his eyes drifted to his feet, in their accustomed position on his desk. He looked at his distorted reflection in the shiny black surface of the polished shoes, considering what implications Aquinas might have been able to draw from the distortion. He wondered—
The phone rang.
Father Riley took his feet off the desk, glanced at his watch, and frowned. No one should be calling him at this hour; he still had ten minutes of free time left to himself, and he had come to treasure his scant minutes for meditation.
Oh, well; he shrugged and pushed the answer button. The face that came on the screen was young and worried-looking. “Father, I hate to interrupt you, but something’s screwy down here and we can’t figure it out. Could you come down right away?”
The priest lifted a black, bushy eyebrow and speared the man in the screen with a glance from a cold, blue eye. The other eye was squinted, almost closed; it was a favorite trick of his.
“Ceuldn’t you have called Dr. Treadwell, Jerry?” he asked in a too-soft voice. “After all, he’s the man to call on when troubles pop up. He told you that himself.”
Jerry grinned. “I know what you’re thinking, Father. But Dr. Treadwell’s is in his sanctum sanctorum too, and it’s just as holy for him as yours is for you. He can’t be reached by phone; he shuts the damned—pardon me, Father—he shuts the phone off.”
“I know he shuts the damned thing off,” Father Riley said coolly. “I would., too, except that someone might need me.”
The grin left Jerry’s face. “Well, I can’t actually say that this is an emergency, but I’m glad that Treadwell can’t be reached.” He nervously put a hand up to smooth a wayward cowlick, but to no avail. “Father, we need someone with brains to figure this one out.”
“That’s not the proper way to speak about your superior,” said Father Riley in mock severity. “But since you put it that way, I’ll be right down.” He cut the connection.
HE TOOK off his cassock and reluctantly put on the tight, uncomfortable, black uniform jacket with the golden crosses on the lapels—the uniform of a chaplain in the Space Service. After checking to see that the drawer containing the ledger was properly locked, he left his study and took the elevator to the basement of the Spatial Research Building.
Jerry Stein was waiting for him at the entrance to the sub-electronics lab.
“Well, Jerry?” Father Riley asked when he saw the short, dark technician waiting and still trying unsuccessfully to comb his hair. “Come on in. Father,” Stein said.
The priest peered in through the heavy, welded transite window. “You haven’t got any haywire set-ups in there, have you?” he asked.
Stein shook his head. “Nope. This is all shielded stuff; you won’t need a suit.”
Father Riley touched the opener, and the door slid aside. He motioned Stein in ahead of him and followed him over to an intricate maze of crystal, plastic, and silver that spread over one section of the lab bench.
Standing beside it were two more men, wearing dark-green technicians’ smocks. Sam Quinlan was a tall, mild-looking blond who seemed to be continually bored, as though there were nothing in the world that could possibly interest him. Lee Nelson was short and thin, with a hatchet nose and a perpetual smirk.
Quinlan smiled lazily as the Jesuit approached. “Come to see our circus. Father?”
Nelson rubbed his hands together, and his smirk almost changed to a grin. “Sure. Come on over, Father, see if you can figure this one out. It’s one for the books—and not the Good Book, either.”
Riley stepped over to the gadget and frowned. “What’s the trouble? Isn’t this the test apparatus for the Interspace field? I see you’ve made a few changes.”
Stein nodded. “Yeah. We connected in the viewscreen to see what we were doing.” He pointed to a screen which was covered with a sheet of cloth.
Father. Riley gestured to it, also. “Why the draperies?”
“We wanted to tell you what we did,” Quinlan said. “This needs the proper buildup for you to really appreciate it.”
THE PRIEST pulled up a chair and sat down. “All right, let’s hear your buildup.”
“First, Father, are you aware of what we’re doing—exactly, I mean?”
Riley snorted. “I probably know as much about this project as—as Treadwell, at least. Let me see: you’ve been running tests on the interspace effect; you’re supposed to be doing research on the possibility of using it as an interstellar drive.”
Stein nodded. “Right.”
“Okay. What’s that got to do with a TV screen, then?” He glanced quizzically from one to another to the third.
According to Bleekman’s Equations,” Quinlan said, “when an object is suspended in a powerful enough sub-electronic field, it ceases to exist in this universe. It goes into the so-called interspace, and—”
Father Riley held up a hand. “If this is your idea of buildup, spare me; the question of what happens has never been settled, anyway—that’s what you’re supposed to be finding out. Just how elementary is this buildup going to be?”
Quinlan’s broad, lazy smile didn’t waver. “That’s elementary enough. Here’s the sticker: You see, we followed the blasted object—and we still don’t know where it’s gone!”
Riley shook his head. “Huh?”
“We rigged up a TV camera inside a little antigravity shell, so that we could maneuver the camera around wherever we wanted to,” Stein explained. “Then we put the whole apparatus into the field projector. It vanished, all right, and we still have TV contact with it. But look what we’re getting.” He walked over to the screen and pulled the cloth off. “We didn’t shut it off, or fiddle with the circuits in any way; come take a look.”
Father Riley heaved himself ponderously out of the chair and walked across the lab to see what Stein was pointing at.
The scene mirrored in the screen was the interior of the room they were in—the sub-electronics lab. At a quick glance, Riley could see that the pickup point was situated at the approximate center of the sub-electronic field that had been forced into being by the throbbing subetheric generators on the table.
The room was recognizable, though, Father Riley saw at once, oddly distorted. It reminded him of the curious reflection in his polished shoes. What would Aquinas make of this? he thought in wonderment.
The room was recognizable, all right, but what was going on inside it was chaotic. There were several people in the room, standing, walking, moving their hands. Some of them seemed to walk through each other as though they didn’t exist; others would abruptly vanish, to reappear elsewhere in the room. All of them moved with blurred, jerky motions. And there were too many of them.
FATHER RILEY recognized himself in four different places! No, three. One of him had vanished. Quinlan Nelson, and Stein were there, too, represented by three or four and sometimes five different figures each. Even the formidable Dr. Treadwell was there in several editions, all of them gesticulating frantically.
Dr. Treadwell? Hastily, Riley turned away from the screen and glanced around the room to see if Treadwell had entered. He hadn’t; he wasn’t in the room at all.
“I see that Dr. Treadwell has made his appearance this time,” said Nelson. “I figured he’d get into the act before long.” The smirk was still on his face, but there was a sort of grudging respect in his voice.
“One of the reasons we called you,” Stein said to Father Riley, “was that we saw you on the screen when you weren’t even here.”
The four men watched the kaleidoscopic crowd scene for several seconds in silence. Finally, when the silence was becoming oppressive, Quinlan said: “Just what’s going on, Father?” The priest bit at his lower lip. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked up. “Have you checked all your circuits?” Nelson nodded. “Sure we have. Thoroughly. Twice, as a matter of fact.”
Riley absorbed the statement silently. He was well aware that Nelson didn’t consider a priest the proper person to be sticking his nose into the realm of physics. He knew that, according to Nelson’s way of thinking, the right place for the Reverend Sean Aloysius Riley was not a physics lab, but a quiet monastery where he could spend his days arguing about the quantity of angels that could stand on the point—or, for variety, the head—of a pin.
“We’ve checked everything we can,” Quinlan amended. “We couldn’t get at some of the high-voltage stuff without shutting off the current; and we didn’t want to do that until we checked everything else. Besides, we wanted you to see it.”
“And Dr. Treadwell,” Nelson added. The priest turned and looked down at Nelson, reflecting that the little man’s face was best described as ratty. “Mr. Nelson,” he asked, deliberately not understanding, “Why should you want me to see Dr. Treadwell? Is something the matter with him?” Nelson’s face looked pained, as if he were just barely repressing a curse. “I meant that we wanted Dr. Treadwell to see the machine before we shut it off,” he explained. “Not that we wanted you to see him.”
“We’re not sure we’ll get the same effect once we turn it back on,” Stein said. “So we’re not turning it off.” Father Riley studied the weird cavortings taking place on the TV screen and smiled admiringly. “You’ve sure got a lulu of an effect there now.” He walked over to the control board and studied it carefully.
“These control the antigravity shell?” he asked.
“That’s right,” said Quinlan. “Standard investigator controls. This one moves it left and right; this one forward and backward; and the third one controls the altitude. And here’s your swivel control to rotate the pickup through the full three hundred and sixty degrees.”
RILEY NODDED and put his hand on the swivel control. He began turning it slowly, watching the scene in the screen. The camera panned around the room as he twisted the knob, and the priest’s eyes narrowed as he watched the screen for some sign of stability in the shifting, kaleidoscopic scene.
It looked like a movie film which had been quadruply or quintuply exposed, with breaks and omissions in the action. Oddly, the background remained the same—or nearly so. The walls were solid and unmoving; the sinks and cabinets didn’t change; the desks remained where they were. But the people! They were a myriad of ghosts, flickering, changing, disappearing, walking through each other, multiplying and dividing with dizzying rapidity. At times, they seemed to have three or four arms or legs, and their faces were blurred and almost unrecognizable.
And yet, as he watched, he could see that there were only five men in the room. After eliminating all the duplications—no easy task, since no one stood still for long—he could see only himself, Nelson, Stein, Quinlan, and Treadwell.
Perhaps, he thought, if he changed the location of the camera, he could tell more. He reached out and turned the altitude control to “up.”
Instantly, the scene changed. It was still the inside of the lab, seen from the same location, but the ghostly figures which had moved chaotically across the screen vanished. The background became foggier, although it remained unchanged and stable.
“How’s that?” the priest murmured. “They’re all gone.” He returned the control to neutral, and the figures reappeared; but they were not the sama figures this time.
The room seemed to be filled with ghosts, most of them wearing the uniforms of the Space Service. And not just ordinary officers’ uniforms, either; Riley recognized several wearing the white stripes of full generals. Father Riley frowned, trying to figure out just what was going on. It would, bewilder even St. Thomas, he thought, and the image of a bewildered Aquinas pleased him immensely.
“I’ll be damned,” said Quinlan’s voice softly. “What in the devil are a bunch of general officers doing there? They weren’t there a minute ago; where’d they come from? The same place Treadwell did?”
