The fredric brown collec.., p.50
The Fredric Brown Collection, page 50
“Well, Charles, what have you been up to now?” Charlie grinned a bit weakly. He said, “Hi, doc. I’ll bite. What have I been up to?”
Doe Palmer pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat down in it. He reached out for Charlie’s wrist and held it while he looked at the second hand of his watch. Then he read the chart at the end of the bed and said “Hmph.”
“Is that the diagnosis,” Charlie wanted to know, “or the treatment? Listen, first what about the teamster? That is if you know-“
“Paula told rue what happened. Teamster’s under arrest, and fired. You’re all right, Charles. Nothing serious,”
“Nothing serious? What’s it a non-serious case of? In other words, what happened to me?”
“You keeled over. Prostration. And you’ll be peeling for a few days, but that’s all. Why didn’t you use a lotion of some kind yesterday?”
Charlie closed his eyes and opened them again slowly. And said, “Why didn’t I use a-For what?”
“The sunburn, of course. Don’t you know you can’t go swimming on a sunny day and not get-“
“But I wasn’t swimming yesterday, doc. Nor the day before. Gosh, not for a couple weeks, in fact. What do you mean, sunburn?”
Doc Palmer rubbed his chin. He said, “You better rest a while, Charles. If you feel all right by this evening, you can go borne. But you’d better not work tomorrow.”
He got up and went out.
The nurse was still there, and Charlie looked at her blankly. He said, “Is Doc Palmer going-Listen, what’s this all about?”
The nurse was looking at him queerly. She said, “Why! you were…I’m sorry, Mr. Wills, but a nurse isn’t allowed to discuss a diagnosis with a patient. But you haven’t anything to worry about; you heard Dr. Palmer, say you could go home this afternoon or evening.”
“Nuts,” said Charlie. “Listen, what time is it? Or aren’t nurses allowed to tell that?”
“It’s ten-thirty.”
“Golly, and I’ve been here almost two hours.” He figured back; remembering now that he’d passed a clock that said twenty-four minutes after eight just as they’d turned the corner for that last block. And, if he’d been awake again now for five minutes, then for two full hours.
“Anything else you want, sir?”
Charlie shook his head slowly. And then because he wanted her to leave so he could sneak a look at that chart, he said, “Well, yes. Could I have a glass of orange juice?”
As soon as she was gone, he sat up in bed. It hurt a little to do that, and he found his skin was a bit tender to the touch. He looked at his arms, pulling up the sleeves of the hospital nightshirt they’d put on him, and the skin was pinkish. Just the shade of pink that meant the first stage of a mild sunburn.
He looked down inside the nightshrt, and then at his legs, and said, “What the hell-” Because the sunburn, if it was sunburn, was uniform all over.
And that didn’t make sense, because he hadn’t been in the sun enough to get burned at any time recently, and he hadn’t been in the sun at all without his clothes. And—yes, the sunburn extended even over the area which would have been covered by trunks if he had gone swimming.
But maybe the chart would explain. He reached over the foot of the bed and took the clipboard with the chart off the hook.
“Reported that patient fainted suddenly on street without apparent cause. Pulse 135, respiration labored, temperature 104, upon admission. All returned to normal within first hour. Symptoms seem to approximate those of heat prostration, but—”
Then there were a few qualifying comments which were highly technical-sounding. Charlie didn’t understand them, and somehow he had a hunch that Doc Palmer didn’t understand them either. They had a whistling-in-the-dark sound to them.
Click of heels in the hall outside and he put the chart back quickly and ducked under the covers. Surprisingly, there was a knock. Nurses wouldn’t knock, would they?
He said, “Come in.”
It was Jane. Looking more beautiful than ever, with her big brown eyes a bit bigger with fright. “Darling! I came as soon as the Pest called home and told me. But she was awfully vague. What on earth happened?”
By that time she was within reach, and Charlie put his arms around her and didn’t give a darn, just then, what had happened to him. But he tried to explain. Mostly to himself.
IV
PEOPLE ALWAYS try to explain.
Face a man, or a woman, with something he doesn’t understand, and he’ll be miserable until he classifies it. Lights in the sky. And a scientist tells him it’s the aurora borealis-or the aurora australis-and he can accept the lights, and forget them.
Something knocks pictures off a wall in an empty room, and throws a chair downstairs. Consternation, until it’s named. Then it’s only a poltergeist.
Name it, and forget it. Anything with a name can be assimilated.
Without one, it’s-well, unthinkable. Take away the name of anything, and you’ve got blank horror.
Even something as familiar as a commonplace ghoul. Graves in a cemetery dug up, corpses eaten. Horrible thing, it may be; but it’s merely a ghoul; as long as it’s named— But suppose, if you can stand it, there was no such word as ghoul and no concept of one. Then dug-up half-eaten corpses are found. Nameless horror.
Not that the next thing that happened to Charlie Wills had anything to do with a ghoul. Not even a werewolf. But I think that, in a way, he’d have found a werewolf more comforting than the duck. One expects strange behavior of a werewolf, but a duck—
Like the duck in the museum.
Now, there is nothing intrinsically terrible about a duck. Nothing to make one lie awake at night, with cold sweat coming out on top of peeling sunburn. On the whole, a duck is a pleasant object, particularly if it is roasted. This one wasn’t.
Now it is Thursday. Charlie’s stay in the hospital had been for eight hours; they’d released him late in the afternoon, and he’d eaten dinner downtown and then gone home. The boss had insisted on his taking the next day off from work. Charlie hadn’t protested much.
Home, and, after stripping to take a bath, he’d studied his skin with blank amazement. Definitely, a third-degree bum. Definitely, all over him. Almost ready to peel.
It did peel, the next day.
He took advantage of the holiday by taking Jane out to the ball game, where they sat in a grandstand so he could be out of the sun. It was a good game, and Jane understood and liked baseball.
Thursday, back to work.
At eleven twenty-five, Old Man Hapworth, the big boss, came into Charlie’s office.
“Wills,” he said, “we got a rush order to print ten thousand handbills, and the copy will be here in about an hour. I’d like you to follow the thing right through the Linotype room and the composing room and get it on the press the minute it’s made up. It’s a close squeak whether we make deadline on it, and there’s a penalty if we don’t.”
“Sure, Mr. Hapworth. I’ll stick right with it.”
“Fine. I’ll count on you. But listen-it’s a bit early to eat, but just the same you better go out for your lunch hour now. The copy will be here about the time you get back, and you can stick right with the job. That is, if you don’t mind eating early.”
“Not at all,” Charlie lied. He got his hat and went out.
Dammit, it was too early to eat. But he had an hour off and he could eat in half that time, so maybe if he walked half an hour first, he could work up an appetite.
The museum was two blocks away, and the best place to kill half an hour. He went there, strolled down the central corridor without stopping, except to stare for a moment at a statue of Aphrodite that reminded him of Jane Pemberton and made him remember—even more strongly than he already remembered—that it was only six days now until his wedding.
Then he turned off into the room that housed the numismatics collection. He’d used to collect coins when he was a kid, and although the collection had been broken up since then, he still had a mild interest in looking at the big museum collection.
He stopped in front of a showcase of bronze Romans.
But he wasn’t thinking about them. He was still thinking about Aphrodite, or Jane, which was quite understandable under the circumstances. Most certainly, he was not thinking about flying worms or sudden waves of burning heat.
Then he chanced to look across toward an adjacent showcase. And within it, he saw the duck.
It was a perfectly ordinary-looking duck. It had a speckled breast and greenish-brown markings on its wing and a darkish head with a darker stripe starting just above the eye and running down along the short neck. It looked like a wild rather than a domestic duck.
And it looked bewildered at being there.
For just a moment, the complete strangeness of the duck’s presence in a showcase of coins didn’t register with Charlie. His mind was still on Aphrodite. Even while he stared at a wild duck under glass inside a show-case marked “Coins of China.”
Then the duck quacked, and waddled on its awkward webbed feet down the length of the showcase and butted against the glass of the end, and fluttered its wings and tried to fly upward, but hit against the glass of the top. And it quacked again and loudly.
Only then did it occur to Charlie to wonder what a live duck was doing in a numismatics collection. Apparently, to judge from its actions, the duck was wondering the same thing.
And only then did Charlie remember the angelic worn and the sunless sunburn.
And somebody in the doorway said, “Yssst. Hey.”
Charlie turned, and the look on his face must have been something out of the ordinary because the uniformed attendant quit frowning and said, “Something wrong, mister?”
For a brief instant, Charlie just stared at him. Then it occurred to Charlie that this was the opportunity he’d lacked when the angleworm had ascended. Two people couldn’t see the same hallucination. If it was an—
He opened his mouth to say “Look,” but he didn’t have to say anything. The duck heat him to it by quacking loudly and again trying to flutter through the glass of the case.
The attendant’s eyes went past Charlie to the case of Chinese coins and he said “Gaw!”
The duck was still there.
The attendant looked at Charlie again and said, “Are you-” and then stopped without finishing the question and went up to the showcase to look at close range. The duck was still struggling to get out, but more weakly. It seemed to be gasping for breath.
The attendant said, “Gaw!” again, and then over his shoulder to Charlie: “Mister, how did you-That there case is her-hermetchically sealed. It’s airproof. Lookit that bird. It’s-“
It already had; the duck fell over, either dead or unconscious.
The attendant grasped Charlie’s arm. He said firmly, “Mister, you come with me to the boss.” And less firmly, “Uh…how did you get that thing in there? And don’t try to tell me you didn’t, mister. I was through here five minutes ago, and you’re the only guy’s been in here since.”
Charlie opened his mouth, and closed it again. He had a sudden vision of himself being questioned at the headquarters of the museum and then at the police station. And if the police started asking questions about him, they’d find out about the worm and about his having been in the hospital for— And, golly, they’d get an alienist maybe, and—
With the courage of sheer desperation, Charlie smiled. He tried to make it an ominous smile; it may not have been ominous, but it was definitely unusual. “How would you like,” he asked the attendant, “to find yourself in there?” And he pointed with his free arm through the entrance and out into the main hallway at the stone sarcophagus of King Mene-Ptah. “I can do it, the same way I put that duck—”
The museum attendant was breathing hard. His eves looked slightly glazed, and he let go of Charlie’s arm. He said, “Mister, did you really—”
“Want me to show you how?”
“Uh…Gaw!” said the attendant. He ran.
Charlie forced himself to hold his own pace down to a rapid walk, and went in the opposite direction to the side entrance that led out into Beeker Street.
And Beeker Street was still a very ordinary-looking street, with lots of midday traffic, and no pink elephants climbing trees and nothing going on but the hurried confusion of a city street. Its very noise was soothing, in a way; although there was one bad moment when he was crossing at the corner and heard a sudden noise behind him. He turned around, startled, afraid of what strange thing he might see there.
But it was only a truck, and he got out of its way in time to avoid being run over.
V
LUNCH. And Charlie was definitely getting into a state of jitters. His hand shook so that he could scarcely pick up his coffee without slopping it over the edge of the cup.
Because a horrible thought was dawning in his mind. If something was wrong with him, was it fair to Jane Pemberton for him to go ahead and marry her? Is it fair to saddle the girl one loves with a husband who might go to the icebox to get a bottle of milk and find-God knows what?
And he was deeply, madly in love with Jane.
So he sat there, an unbitten sandwich on the plate before him, and alternated between hope and despair as he tried to make sense out of the three things that had happened to him within the past week.
Hallucination?
But the attendant, too, had seen the duck!
How comforting it had been—it seemed to him now—that, after seeing the angelic angleworm, he had been able to tell himself it had been an hallucination. Only an hallucination.
But wait. Maybe—
Could not the museum attendant, too, have been part of the same hallucination as the duck? Granted that he, Charlie, could have seen a duck that wasn’t there, couldn’t he also have included in the same category a museum attendant who professed to see the duck? Why not? A duck and an attendant who sees it—the combination could he as illusory as the duck alone.
And Charlie felt so encouraged that he took a bite out of his sandwich.
But the burn? Whose hallucination was that? Or was there some sort of a natural physical ailment that could produce a sudden skin condition approximating mild sunburn? But, if there were such a thing, then evidently Doc Palmer didn’t know about it.
Suddenly Charlie caught a glimpse of the clock on the wall, and it was one o’clock, and he almost strangled on that bite of sandwich when he realized that he was over half an hour late, and must have been sitting in the restaurant almost an hour.
He got up and ran back to the office.
But all was well; Old Man Hapworth wasn’t there. And the copy for the rush circular was late and got there just as Charlie arrived.
He said “Whew!” at the narrowness of his escape, and concentrated hard on getting that circular through the plant. He rushed it to the Linotypes and read proof on it himself, then watched make-up over the compositor’s shoulder. He knew he was making a nuisance of himself, but it killed the afternoon.
And he thought, “Only one more day to work after today, and then my vacation, and on Wednesday-” Wedding on Wednesday.
But—
If—
The Pest came out of the proofroom in a green smock and looked at him. “Charlie,” she said, “you look like something no self-respecting cat would drag in. Say… what’s wrong with you? Really?”
“Ph…nothing. Say, Paula, will you tell Jane when you get home that I may be a bit late this evening? I got to stick here till these handbills are off the press.”
“Sure, Charlie. But tell me-“
“Nix. Run along, will you? I’m busy.”
She shrugged her shoulders, and went back into the proofroom.
The machinist tapped Charlie’s shoulder. “Say, we got that new Linotype set up. Want to take a look?”
Charlie nodded and followed. He looked over the installation, and then slid into the operator’s chair in front of the machine. “How does she run?”
“Sweet. Those Blue Streak models are honeys. Try it.”
Charlie let his fingers play over the keys, setting words without paying any attention to what they were. He sent in three lines to cast, then picked the slugs out of the stick. And found that he had set: “For men have died and worms have eaten them and ascendeth unto Heaven where it sitteth upon the right hand-“
“Gaw!” said Charlie. And that reminded him of—
VI
JANE NOTICED that there was something wrong. She couldn’t have helped noticing. But instead of asking questions, she was unusually nice to him that evening.
And Charlie, who had gone to see her with the resolution to tell her the whole story, found himself weakening. As men always weaken when they are with the women they love and the parlor lamp is turned low.
But she did ask: “Charles-you do want to marry me, don’t y? I mean, if there’s any doubt in your mind and that’s what has been worrying you, we can postpone the wedding till you’re sure whether you love me enough-“
“Love you?” Charlie was aghast. “Why-“
And he proved it pretty satisfactorily.
So satisfactorily, in fact, that he completely forgot his original intention to suggest that very postponement. But never for the reason she suggested. With his arms around Jane-well, the poor chap was only human.
A man in love is a drunken man, and you can’t exactly blame a drunkard for what he does under the influence of alcohol. You can blame him, of course, for getting drunk in the first place; but you can’t put even that much blame on a man in love. In all probability, he fell through no fault of his own. In all probability his original intentions were strictly dishonorable; then, when those intentions met resistance, the subtle chemistry of sublimation converted them into the stuff that stars are made of.
Probably that was why he didn’t go to see an alienist the next day. He was a bit afraid of what an alienist might tell him. He weakened and decided to wait and see if anything else happened.
