The fredric brown collec.., p.51
The Fredric Brown Collection, page 51
Maybe nothing else would happen.
There was a comforting popular superstition that things went in groups of three, and three things had happened already.
Sure, that was it. From now on, he’d be all right. After all, there wasn’t anything basically wrong; there couldn’t be. He was in good health. Aside from Tuesday, he hadn’t missed a day’s work at the print shop in two years.
And-well, by now it was Friday noon and nothing had happened for a full twenty-four hours, and nothing was going to happen again.
It didn’t, Friday, but he read something that jolted him out of his precarious complacency.
A newspaper account.
He sat down in the restaurant at a table at which a previous diner had left a morning paper. Charlie read it while he was waiting for his order to be taken. He finished scanning the front page before the waitress came, and the comic section while he was eating his soup, and then turned idly to the local page.
GUARD AT MUSEUM IS SUSPENDED
Curator Orders Investigation
And the cold spot in his stomach got larger and colder as he read, for there it was in black and white.
The wild duck had really been in the showcase. No one could figure out how it had been put there. They’d had to take the showcase apart to get it out, and the showcase showed no indication of having been tampered with. It had been puttied up air-tight to keep out dust, and the putty had not been damaged.
A guard, for reasons not clearly given in the article, had been given a three-day suspension. One gathered from the wording of the story that the curator of the museum had felt the necessity of doing something about the matter.
Nothing of value was missing from the case. One Chinese coin with a hole in the middle, a haikwan tad, made of silver, had not been findable after the affair; but it wasn’t worth much. There was some doubt as to whether it had been stolen by one of the workmen who had disassembled the showcase or whether it had been accidentally thrown out with the debris of old putty.
The reporter, telling the thing humorously, suggested that probably the duck had mistaken the coin for a doughnut because of the hole, and had eaten it. And that the curator’s best revenge would be to eat the duck.
The police had been called in, but had taken the attitude that the whole affair must have been a practical joke. By whom or how accomplished, they didn’t know. Charlie put down the paper and stared moodily across the room.
Then it definitely hadn’t been a double hallucination, a case of his imagining both duck and attendant. And until now that the bottom had fallen out of that idea, Charlie hadn’t realized how strongly he’d counted on the possibility.
Now he was back where he’d started.
Unless—
But that was absurd. Of course, theoretically, the newspaper item he had just read could be an hallucination too, but—No, that was too much to swallow. According to that line of reasoning, if he went around to the museum and talked to the curator, the curator himself would be an hallucin—
“Your duck, sir.”
Charlie jumped halfway out of his chair.
Then he saw it was the waitress standing at the side of the table with his entree, and that she had spoken because he had the newspaper spread out and there wasn’t room for her to put it down.
“Didn’t you order roast duck, sir? I—”
Charlie stood up hastily, averting his eyes from the dish.
He said, “Sorry-gotta-make-a-phone-call,” and hastily handed the astonished waitress a dollar bill and strode out. Had he really ordered—Not exactly; he’d told her to bring him the special.
But eat duck? He’d rather eat… no, not fried angle-worms either. He shuddered.
He hurried back to the office, despite the fact that he was half an hour early, and felt better once he was within the safe four walls of the Hapworth Printing Co. Nothing out of the way had happened to him there.
As yet.
VII
BASICALLY, Charlie Wills was quite a healthy young man. By two o’clock in the afternoon, he was so hungry that he sent one of the office boys downstairs to buy him a couple of sandwiches.
And he ate them. True, he lifted up the top slice of bread on each and looked inside. He didn’t know what he expected to find there, aside from boiled ham and butter and a piece of lettuce, but if he had found-in lieu of one of those ingredients-say, a Chinese silver coin with a hole in the middle, he would not have been more than ordinarily surprised.
It was a dull afternoon at the plant, and Charlie had time to do quite a bit of thinking. Even a bit of research. He remembered that the plant had printed, several years before, a textbook on entomology. He found the file copy and industriously paged through it looking for a winged worm. He found a few winged things that might be called worms, but none that even remotely resembled the angleworm with the halo. Not even, for that matter, if he disregarded the golden circle, and tried to make identification solely on the basis of body and wings.
No flying angleworms.
There weren’t any medical books in which he could look up-or try to look up-how one could get sun-burned without a sun.
But he looked up “tael” in the dictionary, and found that it was equivalent to a Jiang, which was one-sixteenth of a catty. And that one official hang is equivalent to a hectogram.
None of which seemed particularly helpful.
Shortly before five o’clock he went around saying good-by to everyone, because this was the last day at the office before his two weeks’ vacation, and the good-byes were naturally complicated by good wishes on his impending wedding-which would take place in the first week of his vacation.
He had to shake hands with everybody but the Pest, whom, of course, he’d be seeing frequently during the first few days of his vacation. In fact, he went home with her from work to have dinner with the Pembertons.
And it was a quiet, restful, pleasant dinner that left him feeling better than he’d felt since last Sunday morning. Here in the calm harbor of the Pemberton household, the absurd things that had happened to him seemed so far away and so utterly fantastic that he almost doubted if they had happened at all.
And he felt utterly, completely certain that it was all over. Things happened in threes, didn’t they? If any thing else happened—But it wouldn’t.
It didn’t, that night.
Jane solicitously sent him home at nine o’clock to get to bed early. But she kissed him good night so tenderly, and withal so effectively, that he walked down the street with his head in rosy clouds.
Then, suddenly—out of nothing, as it were—Charlie remembered that the museum attendant had been suspended, and was losing three days’ pay, because of the episode of the duck in the showcase. And if that duck business was Charlie’s fault-even indirectly-didn’t he owe it to the guy to step forward and explain to the museum directors that the attendant had been in no way to blame, and that he should not be penalized?
After all, he, Charlie, had probably scared the poor attendant half out of his wits by suggesting that he could repeat the performance with a sarcophagus instead of a showcase, and the attendant had told such a disconnected story that he hadn’t been believed.
But-had the thing been his fault? Did he owe—
And there he was butting his head against that brick wall of impossibility again. Trying to solve the insoluble.
And he knew, suddenly, that he had been weak in not breaking his engagement to Jane. That what had happened three times within the short space of a week might all too easily happen again.
Gosh! Even at the ceremony. Suppose he reached for the wedding ring and pulled out a—
From the rosy clouds of bliss to the black mire of despair had proved to be a walk of less than a block.
Almost he turned back toward the Pemberton home to tell them tonight, then decided not to. Instead, he’d stop by and talk with Pete Johnson.
Maybe Pete—
What he really hoped was that Pete would talk him out of his decision.
VIII
PETE JOHNSON had a gallon jug, almost full, of wine. Mellow sherry. And Pete had sampled it, and was mellow, too.
He refused even to listen to Charlie, until his guest had drunk one glass and had a second on the table in front of him. Then he said, “You got something on your mind. O. K., shoot.”
“Lookit, Pete. I told you about that angleworm business. In fact, you were practically there when it happened. And you know about what happened Tuesday morning on my way to work. But yesterday-well, what happened was worse, I guess. Because another guy saw it. It was a duck.”
“What was a duck?”
“In a showcase at-Wait, I’ll start at the beginning.” And he did, and Pete listened.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “the fact that it was in the newspaper quashes one line of thought. Uh… fortunately. Listen, I don’t see what you got to worry about. Aren’t you making a mountain out of a few molehills?”
Charlie took another sip of the sherry and lighted a cigarette and said, “How?” quite hopefully.
“Well, three screwy things have happened. But you take any one by itself and it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, does it? Any one of them can be explained. Where you bog down is in sitting there insisting on a blanket explanation for all of them.
“How do you know there is any connection at all? Now, take them separately-“
“You take them,” suggested Charlie. “How would you explain them so easy as all that?”
“First one’s a cinch. Your stomach was upset or something and you had a pure hallucination. Happens to the best people once in a while. Or-you got a second choice just as simple-maybe you saw a new kind of bug. Hell, there are probably thousands of insects that haven’t been classified yet. New ones get on the list every pear.”
“Urn,” said Charlie. “And the heat business?”
“Nell, doctors don’t know everything. You got too mad seeing that teamster beating the horse, and anger has a physical effect, hasn’t it? You slipped a cog somewhere. Maybe it affected your thermodermal gland.”
“What’s a thermodermal gland?”
Pete grinned. “I just invented it. But why not? The medicos are constantly finding new ones or new purposes of old ones. And there’s something in your body that acts as a thermostat and keeps your skin temperature constant. Maybe it went wrong for a minute. Look what a pituitary gland can do for you or against you. Not to mention the parathyroids and the pineal and the adrenals.
“Nothing to it, Charlie. Have some more wine. Now, let’s take the duck business. If you don’t think about it with the other two things in mind, there’s nothing exciting about it. Undoubtedly just a practical joke on the museum or by somebody working there. It was just coincidence that you walked in on it.”
“But the showcase-“
“Bother the showcase! It could have been done somehow; you didn’t check that showcase yourself, and you know what newspapers are. And, for that matter, look what Thurston and Houdini could do with things like that, and let you examine the receptacles before and after. Maybe, too, it wasn’t just a joke. Maybe somebody had a purpose putting it there, but why think that purpose had any connection with you? You’re an egotist, that’s what you are.”
Charlie sighed. “Yes, but, but you take the three things together, and-“
“Why take them together? Look, this morning I saw a man slip on a banana peel and fall; this afternoon I had a slight toothache; this evening I got a telephone call from a girl I haven’t seen in years. Now why should I take those three events and try to figure one common cause for all of them? One underlying motif for all three? I’d go nuts, if I tried.”
“Um,” said Charlie. “Maybe you got something there. But-“
Despite the “but-” he went home feeling cheerful, hopeful, and mellow. And he was going through with the wedding just as though nothing had happened. Apparently nothing, of importance, had happened. Pete was sensible.
Charlie slept soundly that Saturday morning, and didn’t awaken until almost noon.
And Saturday nothing happened.
IX
NOTHING, that is, unless one considered the matter of the missing golf ball as worthy of record. Charlie decided it wasn’t; golf balls disappear all too often. In fact, for a dub golfer, it is only normal to lose at least one ball on eighteen holes.
And it was in the rough, at that.
He’d sliced his drive off the tee on the long fourteenth, and he’d seen it curve off the fairway, hit, bounce, and come to rest behind a big tree; with the tree directly between the ball and the green.
And Charlie’s “Damn!” had been loud and fervent, because up to that hole he had an excellent chance to break a hundred. Now he’d have to lose a stroke chipping the stymied ball back onto the fairway.
He waited until Pete had hooked into the woods on the other side, and then shouldered his bag and walked toward the ball.
It wasn’t there.
Behind the tree and at about the spot where he thought the ball had landed, there was a wreath of wilted flowers strung along a purple cord that showed through at intervals. Charlie picked it up to look under it, but the ball wasn’t there.
So, it must have rolled farther, and he looked but couldn’t find it. Pete, meanwhile, had found his own hall and hit his recovery shot. He came across to help Charlie look and they waved the following foursome to play on through.
“I thought it stopped right here,” Charlie said, “but it must have rolled on. Well, if we don’t find it by the time that foursome’s off the green, I’ll drop another. Say, how’d this thing get here?”
He discovered he still had the wreath in his hand. Pete looked at it and shuddered. “Golly, what a color combination. Violet and red and green on a purple ribbon. It stinks.” The thing did smell a bit, although Pete wasn’t close enough to notice that and it wasn’t what he meant.
“Yeah, but what is it? How’d it get-“
Pete grinned. “Looks like one of those things Hawaiians wear around their necks. Leis, don’t they call them? Hey!”
He caught the suddenly stricken look on Charlie’s face and firmly took the thing out of Charlie’s hand and threw it into the woods. “Now, son,” he said, “don’t go adding that damned thing to your string of coincidences. What’s the difference who dropped it here or why? Come on, find your ball and let’s get ready. The foursome’s on the green already.”
They didn’t find the ball.
So Charlie dropped another. He got it out into the middle of the fairway with a niblick and then a screaming brassie shot straight down the middle put him on, ten feet from the pin. And he one-putted for a par five on the hole, even with the stroke penalty for a lost ball.
And broke a hundred after all. True, back in the clubhouse while they were getting dressed, he said, “Listen, Pete, about that ball I lost on the fourteenth. Isn’t it kind of funny that-“
“Nuts,” Pete grunted. “Didn’t you ever lose a ball before? Sometimes you think you see where they land, and it’s twenty or even forty feet off from where it really is. The perspective fools you.”
“Yeah, but-“
There was that “but” again. It seemed to be the last word on everything that happened recently. Screwy things happen one after another and you can explain each one if you consider it alone, but—
“Have a drink,” Pete suggested, and handed over a bottle.
Charlie did, and felt better. He had several. It didn’t matter, because tonight Jane was going to a shower given by some girl friends and she wouldn’t smell it on his breath.
He said, “Pete, got any plans for tonight? Jane’s busy and it’s one of my last bachelor evenings-“
Pete grinned. “You mean, what are we going to do or get drunk? O. K., count me in. Maybe we can get a couple more of the gang together. It’s Saturday, and none of us has to work tomorrow.”
X
AND IT was undoubtedly a good thing that none of them did have to work Sunday, for few of them would have been able to. It was a highly successful stag evening. Drinks at Tony’s, and then a spot of howling until the manager of the alleys began to get huffy about people bowling balls that started down one alley, jumped the groove, and knocked down pins in the alley adjacent.
And then they’d gone—
Next morning Charlie tried to remember all the places they’d been and all the things they’d done, and decided he was glad he couldn’t. For one thing, he had a confused recollection of having tried to start a fight with a Hawaiian guitar player who was wearing a lei, and that he had drunkenly accused the guitarist of stealing his golf ball. But the others had dragged him out of the place before the police got there.
And somewhere around one o’clock they’d eaten, and Charlie had been so cussed that he’d insisted on trying four eateries before they found one which served duck.
He was going to avenge his golf ball by eating duck. All in all, a very silly and successful spree. Undoubtedly worth a mild hangover.
After all, a guy gets married only once. At least, a man who has a girl like Jane Pemberton in love with him gets married only once.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened Sunday. He saw Jane and again had dinner with the Pembertons. And every time he looked at Jane, or touched her, Charlie had something the sensation of a green pilot making his first outside loop in a fast plane, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. The poor guy was in love.
XI
BUT ON Monday—
Monday was the day that really upset the apple cart. After five fifty-five o’clock Monday afternoon, Charlie knew it was hopeless.
In the morning, he made arrangements with the minister who was to perform the ceremony, and in the afternoon he did a lot of last-minute shopping in the wardrobe line. He found it took him longer than he’d thought.
