“Good Lord, now what do you care about that?”
He was up already, pulling the hood over his head.
“No matter,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”
“A trifle, nonsense! Let’s go quickly… what the hell are we losing time for?”
We went up into the street.
“You made the right decision,” said Peck. What kind of world is this? Are we men in it? Trash is what it is and not a world. Taxi!” he yelled. “Hey, taxi!”
He shook in sudden excitement. “What possessed me to go to that Oasis… Oh no… from now on I’ll go nowhere … nowhere.”
“Let me have your address,” I said.
“What do you want with my address?”
A taxi drew up and Buba tore at the door.
“Address,” I said, grabbing him by the shoulder.
“What a dumbhead,” said Buba.. “Sunshine Street, number eleven… Dumbhead!” he repeated, seating himself.
“I’ll come to see you tomorrow.”
He paid no more attention to me.
“Sunshine,” he threw at the driver. “Through downtown, and hurry, for God’s sake.”
How simple, I thought, looking after his car. How simple everything turned out to be. And everything fits. The bath and Devon. Also the screaming radios, which irritated us so, and to which we never paid any attention. We simply turned them off. I took a taxi and set out for home.
But what if he deceived me, I thought. Simply wanted to be rid of me sooner. But I would determine that soon enough. He doesn’t look like a runner, an agent, at all, I thought. After all, he is Peck. However, no, he is no longer Peck. Poor Peck. You are no agent, you are simply a victim. You know where to buy this filth, but you are only a victim. I don’t want to interrogate Peck, I don’t want to shake him down like some punk. True, he is no longer Peck. Nonsense, what does that mean, that he is not Peck. He is Peck, and still I’ll have to… Electric wave psychotechnics… But the shivers they’re wave psychotechnics too…. Somehow, it’s a bit too simple. I haven’t passed two days here yet, while Rimeyer has been living here since the uprising. We left him behind, and he had gone native and everyone was pleased with him, although in his latest reports he wrote that nothing like what we were looking for existed here. True, he has nervous exhaustion… and Devon on the floor. Also there is Oscar. Further, he did not beg me to leave him be, but simply pointed me in the direction of the Fishers.
I didn’t meet anyone either in the front yard or in the hall.. It was almost five. I went to my rooms and called Rimeyer. A quiet female voice answered.
“How is the patient?” I asked.
“He is asleep. He shouldn’t be disturbed.”
“I won’t do that. Is he better?”
“I told you he fell asleep. And don’t call too often, please. The phone disturbs him.”
“You will be with him all the time?”
“Till morning, at least. If you call again, I’ll have the phone disconnected.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Just, please, don’t leave him till morning, I’ll not trouble you again.”
I hung up and sat awhile in the big comfortable chair in front of the huge absolutely bare table. Then I took the slug out of my pocket and laid it in front of me. A small shiny tube, inconspicuous and completely harmless to all outward appearances, an ordinary electronic component. Such can be made by the millions. They should cost pennies.
“What’s that you got there?” asked Len, right next to my
He stood alongside and regarded the slug.
“Don’t you know?” I asked.
“It’s from a radio. I have one like it in my radio and it’s breaking all the time.”
I pulled my radio out of my pocket and extracted its mixer and laid it alongside the slug. The mixer looked like the slug, but it was not a slug.
“They are not the same,” said Len. “But I have seen one of those gadgets, too.”
“What gadget?”
“Like the one you have.”
All at once, his face clouded over and he looked grim.
“Did you remember?”
“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t remember anything.”
“All right, then.” I picked up the slug and inserted it in place of the mixer in the radio. Len grabbed me by the hand.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
He didn’t reply, eyeing the radio warily.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked.
“I’m not afraid of anything. Where did you get that idea?”
“Look in the mirror,” I said. “You look as though you are afraid for me.” I put the radio in my pocket.
“For you?” he said in astonishment.
“Obviously for me. Not for yourself, of course, though you are still scared of those… necrotic phenomena.”
He looked sideways.
“Where did you get that idea,” he said. “We’re just playing.”
I snorted in disdain.
“I am well acquainted with these games. Rut one thing I
don’t know: where in our time do necrotic phenomena come from?”
He glanced around and began backing up.
“I’m going,” he said.
“O no,” I said decisively. “Let’s finish what we started. Man to man. Don’t think that I am altogether an ignoramus.”
“What do you know?” He was already near the door and talking very quietly.
“More than you,” I said severely. “But I don’t want to shout it all over the house. If you want to talk, come on over here. Climb up on the desk and have yourself a seat. Believe me, I’m not a necrotic phenomenon.”
He hesitated for a whole minute, and everything for which he hoped and everything of which he was afraid appeared and disappeared on his face. At last, he said, “Just let me close the door.”
He ran into the living room, closed the door to the hallway, returned to close the study door tight, and approached me. His hands were in his pockets, the face white, contrasting with the protruding ears, which were red but cold.
“In the first place, you are a dope,” I pronounced, dragging him toward me and standing him between my knees. “Once there was a boy who lived in such a fear that his pants never dried out, not even when he was on a beach, and his ears were as cold as though they had been left in a refrigerator overnight. This boy trembled constantly and so well that when he grew up his legs were all wiggly, and his skin became like that of a plucked goose.”
I was hoping that he would smile just once, but he listened very intently and very seriously inquired, “And what was he afraid of?”
“He had an elder brother, who was a nice fellow, but a great one for drinking. And, as often happens, the tipsy brother was not at all like the sober brother. He got to look very wild indeed. And when he really drank a lot, he got to look like a dead man. So this boy…”
A contemptuous smile appeared on Len’s face.
“He sure found something to be scared of. When they are drunk is when they turn good.”
“Who are they?” I asked immediately. “Mother? Vousi?”
“That’s it. Mother is just the opposite — in the morning when she gets up, she’s always nasty, and then she drinks vermouth once, then twice, and that’s it. Toward evening she is altogether nice because night is near.”
“And at night?”
“At night that creep comes around,” Len said reluctantly.
“We are not concerned with the creep,” I said in a businesslike manner. “It’s not from him that you run to the garage.”
“I don’t run,” he said stubbornly. “It’s a game.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said. “There are, of course, certain things in this world of which even I am afraid. For instance when a boy is crying and trembling. I can’t look at such things, and it just turns me over inside. Or when your teeth hurt and it is required by circumstances that you keep on smiling — that’s pretty bad and there is no way of ignoring it. But there are also just plain stupidities. When, for example, some idiots help themselves, out of sheer boredom and surfeit, to the brain of a living monkey. That’s no longer frightening, it’s just plain disgusting. Especially as they didn’t think it up by themselves. It was a thousand years ago when they thought of it first, and also out of excessive affluence, the fat tyrants of the Far East. And contemporary idiots heard and rejoiced. But they should be pitied, not feared.”
“Pity them?” said Len. “But they don’t pity anybody. They do whatever they like. It’s all the same to them, don’t you see? It they are bored, then they don’t care whose head they saw apart. Idiots… Maybe in the daytime they are idiots, but you don’t seem to understand that at night they are not idiots, they are all accursed.”