Hugo awards the short st.., p.46
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 46
"Are you claiming you're a superman?"
"Good God! No! I'm a damned man ... a tortured man, because some of the patterns I must adjust to are outworld rhythms like nothing we ever experience on earth . . . 29/51 . . . 108/303 . . . tempi like that, alien, terrifying, agony to live with."
He took another deep breath. "Off the record, what's this about abominable acts?"
"That's why I can't have friends or let myself fall in love. Sometimes the patterns turn so ugly that I have to make frightful sacrifices to restore the 'design. I must destroy something I love."
"This is sacrifice?"
"Isn't it the only meaning of sacrifice, Sawyer? You give up what's dearest to you."
"Who to?"
"The Gods, The Fates, The Big Pattern that's controlling me. , From where? I don't know. It's too big a universe to comprehend, : but I have to beat its tempo with my actions and reactions, emotions and senses, to make the patterns come out even, balanced in some way that I don't understand. The pressures that
whipsaw me
back and
and turn
forth me
and into
back the
and transcendental
forth 3.141591
and maybe I talk too much to R. Sawyer and the patterns pronounce:
PI MAN, IT IS NOT PERMITTED.
So. There is darkness and silence.
"The other arm now," Jemmy said firmly. "Lift."
I am on my bed, me. Thinking upheaved again. Half (H ) into pyjamas; other half (H ) being wrestled by paleface girl. I lift. She yank. Pyjamas now on, and it's my turn to blush. They raise me prudish in Lee's Hill.
"Pot roast done?" I ask.
"What?"
"What happened?"
"You pooped out. Keeled over. You're not so cool."
"How much do you know?"
"Everything. I was on the other side of that mirror thing. Mr. Sawyer had to let you go. Mr. Lundgren helped lug you up to the apartment. He thinks you're stoned. How much should I give him?"
"Cinque lire. No. Parla Italiano, gentile signorina?"
"Are you asking me do I speak Italian? No."
"Entschuldigen, Sie, bitte. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
"Is this your patterns again?"
I nod.
"Can't you stop?"
After stopovers in Greece and Portugal, Ye Englische finally returns to me. "Can you stop breathing, Jemmy?"
"Is it like that, Peter? Truly?"
"Yes."
"When you do something . . . something bad ... do you know why? Do you know exactly what it is somewhere that makes you do it?"
"Sometimes yes. Other times no. All I know is that I'm compelled to respond."
"Then you're just the tool of the universe."
"I think we all are. Continuum creatures. The only difference is, I'm more sensitive to the galactic patterns and respond violently. So why don't you get the hell out of here, Jemmy Thomas?"
"I'm still stuck," she said.
"You can't be. Not after what you heard."
"Yes, I am. You don't have to marry me."
Now the biggest hurt of all. I have to be honest. I have to ask, "Where's the silver case?"
A long pause. "Down the incinerator."
"Do you ... Do you know what was in it?"
"I know what was in it."
"And you're still here?"
"It was monstrous what you did. Monstrous!" Her face suddenly streaked with mascara. She was crying. "Where is she now?"
"I don't know. The checks go out every quarter to a numbered account in Switzerland. I don't want to know. How much can the heart endure?"
"I think I'm going to find out, Peter."
"Please don't find out." I make one last effort to save her. "I love you, paleface, and you know what that can mean. When the patterns turn cruel, you may be the sacrifice."
"Love creates patterns, too." She kissed me. Her lips were parched, her skin was icy, she was afraid and hurting, but her heart beat strong with love and hope. "Nothing can crunch us now. Believe me."
"I don't know what to believe anymore. We're part of a world that's beyond knowing. What if it turns out to be too big for love?"
"AH right," she said composedly. "We won't be dogs in the manger. If love is a little thing and has to end, then let it end. Let all little things like love and honor and mercy and laughter end, if there's a bigger design beyond."
"But what's bigger? What's beyond? I've asked that for years. Never an answer. Never a clue."
"Of course. If we're too small to survive, how can we know? Move over."
Then she is in bed with me, the tips of her body like frost while the rest of her is hot and evoking, and there is such a consuming burst of passion that for the first time I can forget myself, forget everything, abandon everything, and the last thing I think is: God damn the world^ God damn the universe.
God damn GGG-o-ddddddd
THEY DON'T MAKE LIFE LIKE THEY USED TO
The girl driving the jeep was very fair and very Nordic. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a pony tail but it was so long that it was more a mare's tail. She wore sandals, a pair of soiled bluejeans, and nothing else. She was nicely tanned. As she turned the jeep off Fifth Avenue and drove bouncing up the steps of the library, her bosom danced enchantingly.
She parked in front of the library entrance, stepped out, and was about to enter when her attention was attracted by something across the street. She peered, hesitated, then glanced down at her jeans and made a face. She pulled off the pants and hurled them at the pigeons.
THE ALLEY MAN
Philip Jose Farmer
The man from the puzzle factory was here this morning,“ X said Gummy. ”While you was out fishin.“ She dropped the piece of wiremesh she was trying to tie with string over a hole in the rusty window screen. Cursing, grunting like a hog in a wallow, she leaned over and picked it up. Straighten-ing, she slapped viciously at her bare shoulder.
“Figurin skeeters! Must be a million outside, all tryin to get away from the burnin garbage.”
“Puzzle factory?” said Deena. She turned away from the battered kerosene-burning stove over which she was frying sliced potatoes and perch and bullheads caught in the Illinois River, half a mile away.
“Yeah!” snarled Gummy. “You heard Old Man say it. Nuthouse. Booby hatch. So… this cat from the puzzle factory was named John Elkins. He gave Old Man all those tests when they had him locked up last year. He’s the skinny little guy with a moustache ”n never lookin you in the eye ‘n grinnin like a skunk eatin a shirt. The cat who took Old Man’s hat away from him ’n woun’t give it back to him until Old Man promised to be good. Remember now?“ Deena, tall, skinny, clad only in a white terrycloth bathrobe, looked like a surprised and severed head stuck on a pike. The great purple birthmark on her cheek and neck stood out hideously against her paling skin.
“Are they going to send him back to the State hospital?” she asked.
Gummy, looking at herself in the cracked full-length mirror nailed to the wall, laughed and showed her two teeth. Her frizzy hair was a yellow brown, chopped short. Her little blue eyes were set far back in tunnels beneath two protruding ridges of bone; her nose was very long, enormously wide, and tipped with a broken-veined bulb. Her chin was not there, and her head bent forward in a permanent crook. She was dressed only in a dirty once-white slip that came to her swollen knees. When she laughed, her huge breasts, resting on her distended belly, quivered like bowls of fermented cream. From her expression, it was evident that she was not displeased with what she saw in the broken glass.
Again she laughed. “Naw, they din’t come to haul him away. Elkins just wanted to interduce this chick he had with him. A cute little brunette with big brown eyes behint real thick glasses. She looked |ust like a collidge girl, ‘n she was. This chick has got a B.M. or somethin in sexology…”
“Psychology?”
“Maybe it was societyology…”
“Sociology?”
“Umm. Maybe. Anyway, this foureyed chick is doin a study for a foundation. She wants to ride aroun with Old Man, see how he collects his junk, what alleys he goes up ‘n down, what his, uh, habit patterns is, ’n learn what kinda bringin up he had…”
“Old Man’d never do it!” burst out Deena. “You know he can’t stand the idea of being watched by a False Folker!”
“Umm. Maybe. Anyway, I tell em Old Man’s not goin to like their slummin on him, ‘n they say quick they’re not slummin, it’s for science. ’N they’ll pay him for his trouble. They got a grant from the foundation. So I say maybe that’d make Old Man take another look at the color of the beer, ‘n they left the house…”
“You allowed them in the house? Did you hide the birdcage?”
“Why hide it? His hat wasn’t in it.”
Deena turned back to frying her fish, but over her shoulder she said, “I don’t think Old Man’ll agree to the idea, do you? It’s rather degrading.”
“You kiddin? Who’s lower’n Old Man? A snake’s belly, maybe. Sure, he’ll agree. He’ll have an eye for the foureyed chick, sure.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Deena. “He’s a dirty stinking one-armed middle-aged man, the ugliest man in the world.”
“Yeah, it’s the uglies he’s got, for sure. ‘N he smells like a goat that fell in a outhouse. But it’s the smell that gets em. It got me, it got you, it got a whole stewpotful a others, includin that high society dame he used to collect junk off of…”
“Shut up!” spat Deena. “This girl must be a highly refined and intelligent girl. She’d regard Old Man as some sort of ape.”
“You know them apes,” said Gummy, and she went to the ancient refrigerator and took out a cold quart of beer.
Six quarts of beer later, Old Man had still not come home. The fish had grown cold and greasy, and the big July moon had risen. Deena, like a long lean dirty-white nervous alley cat on top of a backyard fence, patrolled back and forth across the shanty. Gummy sat on the bench made of crates and hunched over her bottle. Finally, she lurched to her feet and turned on the battered set. But, • hearing a rattling and pounding of a loose motor in the distance, she turned it off.
The banging and popping became a roar just outside the door. Abruptly, there was a mighty wheeze, like an old rusty robot coughing with double pneumonia in its iron lungs. Then, silence.
But not for long. As the two women stood paralyzed, listening apprehensively, they heard a voice like the rumble of distant thunder.
“Take it easy, kid.”
Another voice, soft, drowsy, mumbling.
“Where… we?”
The voice like thunder, “Home, sweet home, where we rest our dome.”
Violent coughing.
“It’s this smoke from the burnin garbage, kid. Enough to make a maggot puke, ain’t it? Lookit! The smoke’s risin’t‘ward the full moon like the ghosts a men so rotten even their spirits’re carryin the contamination with em. Hey, li’l chick, you din’t know Old Man knew them big words like contamination, didja? That’s what livin on the city dump does for you. I hear that word all a time from the big shots that come down inspectin the stink here so they kin get away from the stink a City Hall. 1 ain’t no illiterate. I got a TV set. Hor, hor, hor!”
There was a pause, and the two women knew he was bending his knees and tilting his torso backward so he could look up at the sky.
“Ah, you lovely lovely moon, bride a The Old Guy In The Sky! Some day to come, rum-a-dum-a-dum, one day I swear it, Old Woman a The Old Guy In The Sky, if you help me find the longlost headpiece a King Paley that I and my fathers been lookin for for fifty thousand years, so help me, Old Man Paley’ll spread the freshly spilled blood a a virgin a the False Folkers out acrosst the ground for you, so you kin lay down in it like a red carpet or a new red dress and wrap it aroun you. And then you won’t have to crinkle up your lovely shinin nose at me and spit your silver spit on me. Old Man promises that, just as sure as his good arm is holdin a daughter a one a the Falsers, a virgin, I think, and bringin her to his home, however humble it be, so we shall see…”
“Stoned out a his head,” whispered Gummy.
“My God, he’s bringing a girl in here!” said Deena. “The girl!”
“Not the collidge kid?”
“Does the idiot want to get lynched?”
The man outside bellowed, “Hey, you wimmen, get off your fat asses and open the door ‘fore I kick it in! Old Man’s home with a fistful a dollars, a armful a sleepin lamb, and a gutful a beer! Home like a conquerin hero and wants service like one, too!”
Suddenly unfreezing, Deena opened the door.
Out of the darkness and into the light shuffled something so squat and blocky it seemed more a tree trunk come to life than a man. It stopped, and the eyes under the huge black homburg hat blinked glazedly. Even the big hat could not hide the peculiar lengthened-out bread-loaf shape of the skull. The forehead was abnormally low; over the eyes were bulging arches of bone. These were tufted with eyebrows like Spanish moss that made even more cavelike the hollows in which the little blue eyes lurked. Its nose was very long and very wide and flaring-nostriled. The lips were thin but pushed out by the shoving jaws beneath them. Its chin was absent, and head and shoulders joined almost without intervention from a neck, or so it seemed. A corkscrew forest of rusty-red hairs sprouted from its open shirt front.
Over his shoulder, held by a hand wide and knobbly as a coral branch, hung the slight figure of a young woman.
He shuffled into the room in an odd bent-kneed gait, walking on the sides of his thick-soled engineer’s boots. Suddenly, he stopped again, sniffed deeply, and smiled, exposing teeth thick and yellow, dedicated to biting.
“Jeez, that smells good. It takes the old garbage stink right off. Gummy! You been sprinklin yourself with that perfume I found in a ash heap up on the bluffs?”
Gummy, giggling, looked coy.
Deena said, sharply, “Don’t be a fool, Gummy. He’s trying to butter you up so you’ll forget he’s bringing this girl home.”
Old Man Paley laughed hoarsely and lowered the snoring girl upon an Army cot. There she sprawled out with her skirt around her hips. Gummy cackled, but Deena hurried to pull the skirt down and also to remove the girl’s thick shell-rimmed glasses.
“Lord,” she said, “how did this happen? What’d you do to her?”
“Nothin,” he growled, suddenly sullen.
He took a quart of beer from the refrigerator, bit down on the cap with teeth thick and chipped as ancient gravestones, and tore it off. Up went the bottle, forward went his knees, back went his torso and he leaned away from the bottle, and down went the amber liquid, gurgle, gurgle, glub. He belched, then roared. “There I was, Old Man Paley, mindin my own figurin business, packin a bunch a papers and magazines I found, and here comes a blue fifty-one
Ford sedan with Elkins, the doctor jerk from the puzzle factory. And this little foureyed chick here, Dorothy Singer. And…“
“Yes,” said Deena. “We know who they are, but we didn’t know they went after you.”
“Who asked you? Who’s tellin this story? Anyway, they tole me what they wanted. And I was gonna say no, but this little collidge broad says if I’ll sign a paper that’ll agree to let her travel aroun with me and even stay in our house a couple a evenins, with us actin natural, she’ll pay me fifty dollars. I says yes! Old Guy In The Sky! That’s a hundred and fifty quarts a beer! I got principles, but they’re washed away in a roarin foamin flood of beer.
“I says yes, and the cute little runt give me the paper to sign, then advances me ten bucks and says I’ll get the rest seven days from now. Ten dollars in my pocket! So she climbs up into the seat a my truck. And then this figurin Elkins parks his Ford and says he thinks he ought a go with us to check on if everythin’s gonna be OK.”
“He’s not foolin Old Man. He’s after Little Miss Foureyes. Everytime he looks at her, the lovejuice runs out a his eyes. So, I collect junk for a couple a hours, talkin all the time. And she is scared a me at first because I’m so figurin ugly and strange. But after a while she busts out laughin. Then I pulls the truck up in the alley back a Jack’s Tavern on Ames Street. She asks me what I’m doin. I says I’m stoppin for a beer, just as-1 do every day. And she says she could stand one, too. So…”
“You actually went inside with her?” asked Deena.
“Naw. I was gonna try, but I started gettin the shakes. And I hadda tell her I coun’t do it. She asks me why. I say I don’t know. Ever since I quit bein a kid, I kin’t. So she says I got a… somethin like a fresh flower, what is it?”
“Neurosis?” said Deena.
“Yeah. Only I call it a taboo. So Elkins and the little broad go into Jack’s and get a cold six-pack, and brin it out, and we’re off…”
“So?”
“So we go from place to place, though always stayin in alleys, and she thinks it’s funnier’n hell gettin loaded in the backs a taverns. Then I get to seein double and don’t care no more and I’m over my fraidies, so we go into the Circle Bar. And get in a fight there with one a the hillbillies in his sideburns and leather jacket that hangs out there and tries to take the foureyed chick home with him.”
Both the women gasped, “Did the cops come?”
“If they did, they was late to the party. I grab this hillbilly by his leather jacket with my one arm—the strongest arm in this world—and throw him clean acrosst the room. And when his buddies come after me, I pound my chest like a figurin gorilla and make a figurin face at em, and they all of a sudden get their shirts up their necks and go back to listenin to their hillbilly music. And I pick up the chick—she’s laughin so hard she’s chokin—and Elkins, white as a sheet out a the laundromat, after me, and away we go, and here we are.”
“Yes, you fool, here you are!” shouted Deena. “Bringing that girl here in that condition! She’ll start screaming her head off when she wakes up and sees you!”
“Go figure yourself!” snorted Paley. “She was scared a me a first, and she tried to stay upwind a me. But she got to likin me. I could tell. And she got so she liked my smell, too. I knew she would. Don’t all the broads? These False wimmen kin’t say no once they get a whiff of us. Us Paleys got the gift in the blood.”
