Fergesson glanced up from his tags.
“Forget it,” Stuart said, feeling discouraged.
“I watched him work,” Fergesson said. “I went downstairs and watched him when he didn’t know I was. I agree there’s something unsavory about it. But he’s competent; I looked at what he’d done, and it was done right, and that’s all that counts.” He scowled at Stuart.
“I said forget it,” Stuart said.
“Did they fire the rocket off?”
“Just now.”
“We haven’t moved a single item today, because of that circus,” Fergesson said.
“Circus!” He seated himself in the chair opposite Fergesson, in such a manner that he could watch the floor below them. “It’s history!”
“It’s a way of you guys standing around doing nothing.” Once more Fergesson sorted through the tags.
“Listen, I’ll tell you what Hoppy did.” Stuart leaned toward him. “Up at the café, at Fred’s Fine Foods.”
Fergesson eyed him, pausing in his work.
“He had a fit,” Stuart said. “He went nuts.”
“No kidding.” Fergesson looked displeased.
“He passed Out because-he had a beer. And he saw beyond the grave. He saw me eating a dead rat. And it was raw. So he said.”
Fergesson laughed.
“It’s not funny.”
“Sure it is. He’s razzing you back for all the razzing you dish out and you’re so dumb you get taken in.”
“He really saw it,” Stuart said stubbornly.
“Did he see me?”
“He didn’t say. He does that up there all the time; they give him beers and he goes into his trance and they ask questions. About what it’s like. I just happened to be there, eating lunch. I didn’t even see him leave the store; I didn’t know he would be there.”
For a moment Fergesson sat frowning and pondering, and then he reached out arid pressed the button of the intercom which connected the office with the repair department. “Hoppy, wheel up here to the office; I want to talk to you.”
“It wasn’t my intention to get him into trouble,” Stuart said.
“Sure it was,” Fergesson said. “But I still ought to know; I’ve got a right to know what my employees are doing when they’re in a public place acting in a fashion that might throw discredit on the store.”
They waited, and after a time they heard the labored sound of the cart rolling up the stairs to the office.
As soon as he appeared, Hoppy said, “What I do on my lunch hour is my own business, Mr. Fergesson. That’s how I feel.”
“You’re wrong,” Fergesson said. “It’s my business, too. Did you see me beyond the grave, like you did Stuart? What was I doing? I want to know, and you better give me a good answer or you’re through here, the same day you were hired.”
The phoce, in a low, steady voice, said, “I didn’t see you, Mr. Fergesson, because your soul perished and won’t be reborn.”
For a while Fergesson studied the phoce. “Why is that?” he asked finally.
“It’s your fate,” Hoppy said.
“I haven’t done anything criminal or immoral.”
The phoce said, “It’s the cosmic process, Mr. Fergesson. Don’t blame me.” He became silent, then.
Turning to Stuart, Fergesson said, “Christ. Well, ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.” Returning to the phoce he said, “Did you see anybody else I know, like my wife? No, you never met my wife. What about Lightheiser? What’s going to become of him?”
“I didn’t see him,” the phoce said.
Fergesson said, “How did you fix that changer? How did you really do that? It looked like-you healed it. It looked like instead of replacing that broken spring you made the spring whole again. How did you do that? Is that one of those extra-sensory powers or whatever they are?”
“I repaired it,” the phoce said in a stony voice.
To Stuart, Fergesson said, “He won’t say. But I saw him. He was concentrating on it in some peculiar way. Maybe you were right, McConchie; maybe it was a mistake to hire him. Still, it’s the results that count. Listen, Hoppy, I don’t want you messing around with trances out in public anywhere along this street now that you’re working for me; that was okay before, but not now. Have your trances in the privacy of your own home, is that clear?” He once more picked up his stack of tags. “That’s all. Both you guys, go down and do some work instead of standing around.”
The phoce at once spun his cart around and wheeled off, toward the stairs. Stuart, his hands in his pockets, slowly followed.
When he got downstairs and back to the TV set and the people standing around ft he heard the announcer say excitedly that the first three stages of the rocket appeared to have fired successfully.
That’s good news, Stuart thought. A bright chapter in the history of the human race. He felt a little better, now, and he parked himself by the counter, where he could obtain a good view of the screen.
Why would I eat a dead rat? he asked himself. It must be a terrible world, the next reincarnation, to live like that. Not even to cook it but just to snatch it up and gobble it down. Maybe, he thought, even fur and all; fur and tail, everything. He shuddered.
How can I watch history being made? he wondered angrily. When I have to think about things like dead rats—I want to fully meditate on this great spectacle unfolding before my very eyes, and instead—I have to have garbage like that put into my mind by that sadistic, that radiation-drug freak that Fergesson had to go and hire. Sheoot!
He thought of floppy, then, no longer bound to his cart, no longer an armless, legless cripple, but somehow floating. Somehow master of them all, of—as floppy had said—the world. And that thought was even worse than the one about the rat.
I’ll bet there’s plenty he saw, Stuart said to himself, that he isn’t going to say, that he’s deliberately keeping back. He just tells us enough to make us squirm and then he shuts up. If he can go into a trance and see the next reincarnation then he can see everything because what else is there? But I don’t believe in that Eastern stuff anyhow, he said to himself. I mean, that isn’t Christian.
But he believed what Hoppy had said; he believed because he had seen with his own eyes. There really was a trance. That much was true.
Hoppy had seen something. And it was a dreadful something; there was no doubt of that.
What else does he see? Stuart wondered. I wish I could make the little bastard say. What else has that warped, wicked mind perceived about me and about the rest of us, all of us?
I wish, he thought, I could look, too. Because it seemed to Stuart very important, and he ceased looking at the TV screen. He forgot about Walter and Lydia Dangerfield and history in the making; he thought only about Hoppy and the incident at the café. He wished he could stop thinking about it but he could not.
He thought on and on.
IV
The far-off popping noise made Mr. Austurias turn his head to see what was coming along the road. Standing on the hillside at the edge of the grove of live oaks, he shielded his eyes and saw on the road below the small phocomobile of Hoppy Harrington; in the center of his cart the phocomelus guided himself along, picking a way past the potholes. But the popping noise had not been made by the phocomobile, which ran from an electric battery.
A truck, Mr. Austurias realized. One of Orio Stroud’s converted old wood-burners; he saw it now, and it moved at great speed, bearing down on Hoppy’s phocomobile. The phocomelus did not seem to hear the big vehicle behind him.
The road belonged to Orion Stroud; he had purchased it from the county the year before, and it was up to him to maintain it and also to allow traffic to move along it other than his own trucks, He was not permitted to charge a toll. And yet, despite the agreement, the wood-burning truck clearly meant to sweep the phocomobile from its path; it headed straight without slowing.
God, Mr. Austurias thought. He involuntarily raised his hand, as if warding off the truck. Now it was almost upon the cart, and still Hoppy paid no heed.
Hoppy!” Mr. Austurias yelled, and his voice echoed in the afternoon quiet of the woods, his voice and the poppopping of the truck’s engine.
The phocomelus glanced up, did not see him, continued on with the truck now so close that—Mr. Austurias shut his eyes. When he opened them again he saw the phoco—mobile off onto the shoulder of the road; the truck roared on, and floppy was safe: he had gotten out of the way at the last moment..