The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (58 page)

"Sure," said Goth. She stood up.

"Where you going?" the captain asked.

"Bed," said Goth. "I'm tired." She
stopped at the hall door. "About all I can tell you about us till
then," she said, "you can read in those Regulations, like the one man
said—the one you kicked off the ship. There's a lot about us in there. Lots of
lies, too, though!"

"And when did you find out about the communicator
between here and the captain's cabin?" the captain inquired.

Goth grinned. "A while back," she admitted.
"The others never noticed!"

"All right," the captain said. "Good night,
witch—if you get a stomach ache, yell and I'll bring the medicine."

"Good night," Goth yawned. "I will, I
think."

"And wash behind your ears!" the captain added,
trying to remember the bedtime instructions he'd overheard Maleen giving the
junior witches.

"All right," said Goth sleepily. The hall door
closed behind her— but half a minute later, it was briskly opened again. The
captain looked up startled from the voluminous stack of "General
Instructions and Space Regulations of the Republic of Nikkeldepain" he'd
just discovered in one of the drawers of the control desk. Goth stood in the
doorway, scowling and wide-awake.

"And you wash behind yours!" she said.

"Huh?" said the captain. He reflected a moment.
"All right," he said. "We both will, then."

"Right," said Goth, satisfied. The door closed
once more.

The captain began to run his finger down the lengthy index
of K's —or could it be under W?

The captain was met at the airport by a staff car. Long and
fast it sped. In a narrow, silent room the general sat, ramrod-backed, tense.
The major waited at the foot of the gleaming steps shining frostily in the
night air. Tires screamed to a stop and together the captain and the major
raced up the steps. No words of greeting were spoken. The general stood
quickly, hand outstretched. The captain ripped open a dispatch case and handed
over a thick bundle of papers. The general flipped them over eagerly and spat a
sentence at the major. The major disappeared and his harsh voice rang curtly
down the outside hall. The man with glasses came in and the general handed him
the papers. With jerky fingers the man with glasses sorted them out. With a
wave from the general the captain left, a proud smile on his weary young face.
The general tapped his fingertips on the black glossy surface of the table. The
man with glasses pushed aside crinkled maps, and began to read aloud.

Dear Joe:

I started this just to kill time, because I got tired of
just looking out the window. But when I got almost to the end I began to catch
the trend of what's going on. You're the only one I know that can come through
for me, and when you finish this you'll know why you must. I don't know who
will get this to you. Whoever it is won't want you to identify a face later.
Remember that, and please, Joe—
hurry!

Ed

It all started because I'm lazy. By the time I'd shaken off
the sandman and checked out of the hotel every seat in the bus was full. I
stuck my bag in a dime locker and went out to kill the hour I had until the bus
left. You know the bus terminal: right across from the Book-Cadillac and the
Statler, on Washington Boulevard near Michigan Avenue. Michigan Avenue. Like
Main in Los Angeles, or maybe Sixty-third in its present state of decay in
Chicago, where I was going. Cheap movies, pawnshops and bars by the dozens, a
penny arcade or two, restaurants that feature hamburg steak, bread and butter
and coffee for forty cents. Before the War, a quarter.

I like pawnshops. I like cameras, I like tools, I like to
look in windows crammed with everything from electric razors to sets of socket
wrenches to upper plates. So, with an hour to spare, I walked out Michigan to
Sixth and back on the other side of the street. There are a lot of Chinese and
Mexicans around that part of town, the Chinese running the restaurants and the
Mexicans eating Southern Home Cooking. Between Fourth and Fifth, I stopped to
stare at what passed for a movie. Store windows painted black, amateurish signs
extolling in Spanish "Detroit premiere . . . cast of thousands . . . this
week only ... ten cents—" The few 8X10 glossy stills pasted on the windows
were poor blowups, spotty and wrinkled; pictures of mailed cavalry and what
looked like a good-sized battle. All for ten cents. Right down my alley.

Maybe it's lucky that history was my major in school. Luck
it must have been, certainly not cleverness, that made me pay a dime for a seat
in an undertaker's rickety folding chair imbedded solidly—although the only
other customers were a half-dozen Sons of the Order of Tortilla—in a cast of
second-hand garlic. I sat near the door. A couple of hundred watt bulbs
dangling naked from the ceiling gave enough light for me to look around. In
front of me, in the rear of the store, was the screen, what looked like a
white-painted sheet of beaverboard, and when over my shoulder I saw the battered
sixteen millimeter projector I began to think that even a dime was no bargain.
Still, I had forty minutes to wait.

Everyone was smoking. I lit a cigarette and the discouraged
Mexican who had taken my dime locked the door and turned off the lights, after
giving me a long, questioning look. I'd paid my dime, so I looked right back.
In a minute the old projector started clattering. No film credits, no
producer's name, no director, just a tentative flicker before a closeup of a
bewhiskered mug labeled Cortez. Then a painted and feathered Indian with the
title of Guatemotzin, successor to Montezuma; an aerial shot of a beautiful job
of model-building tagged Ciudad de Mejico, 1521. Shots of old muzzle-loaded
artillery banging away, great walls spurting stone splinters under direct fire,
skinny Indians dying violently with the customary gyrations, smoke and haze and
blood. The photography sat me right up straight. It had none of the scratches
and erratic cuts that characterize an old print, none of the fuzziness, none of
the usual mugging at the camera by the handsome hero. There wasn't any handsome
hero. Did you ever see one of these French pictures, or a Russian, and comment
on the reality and depth brought out by working on a small budget that can't
afford famed actors? This, what there was of it, was as good, or better.

It wasn't until the picture ended with a pan shot of a
dreary desolation that I began to add two and two. You can't, for pennies,
really have a cast of thousands, or sets big enough to fill Central Park. A
mock-up, even, of a thirty-foot fall costs enough to irritate the auditors, and
there had been a lot of wall. That didn't fit with the bad editing and lack of
sound track, not unless the picture had been made in the old silent days. And I
knew it hadn't by the color tones you get with pan film. It looked like a
well-rehearsed and badly-planned news-reel.

The Mexicans were easing out and I followed them to where
the discouraged one was rewinding the reel. I asked him where he got the print.

"I haven't heard of any epics from the press agents
lately, and it looks like a fairly recent print."

He agreed that it was recent, and added that he'd made it
himself. I was polite to that, and he saw that I didn't believe him and
straightened up from the projector.

"You don't believe that, do you?" I said that I
certainly did, and I had to catch a bus. "Would you mind telling me why,
exactly why?" I said that the bus— "I mean it. I'd appreciate it if
you'd tell me just what's wrong with it."

"There's nothing wrong with it," I told him. He
waited for me to go on. "Well, for one thing, pictures like that aren't
made for the sixteen millimeter trade. You've got a reduction from a
thirty-five millimeter master," and I gave him a few of the other reasons
that separate home movies from Hollywood. When I finished he smoked quietly for
a minute.

"I see." He took the reel off the projector
spindle and closed the case. "I have beer in the back." I agreed beer
sounded good, but the bus—well, just one. From in back of the beaverboard
screen he brought paper cups and a jumbo bottle. With a whimsical
"Business suspended" he closed the open door and opened the bottle
with an opener screwed on the wall. The store had likely been a grocery or
restaurant. There were plenty of chairs. Two we shoved around and relaxed
companionably. The beer was warm.

"You know something about this line," tentatively.

I took it as a question and laughed, "Not too much.
Here's mud," and we drank. "Used to drive a truck for the Film
Exchange." He was amused at that.

"Stranger in town?"

"Yes and no. Mostly yes. Sinus trouble chased me out
and relatives bring me back. Not any more, though; my father's funeral was last
week." He said that was too bad, and I said it wasn't. "He had sinus,
too." That was a joke, and he refilled the cups. We talked awhile about
Detroit climate.

Finally he said, rather speculatively, "Didn't I see
you around here last night? Just about eight." He got up and went after
more beer.

I called after him. "No more beer for me." He
brought a bottle anyway, and I looked at my watch. "Well, just one."

"Was it you?"

"Was it me what?" I held out my paper cup.

"Weren't you around here—"

I wiped foam off my mustache. "Last night? No, but I
wish I had. I'd have caught my bus. No, I was in the Motor Bar last night at
eight. And was still there at midnight."

He chewed his lip thoughtfully. "The Motor Bar. Just
down the street?" And I nodded. "The Motor Bar. Hm-m-m." I
looked at him. "Would you like . . . sure, you would." Before I could
figure out what he was talking about he went to the back and from behind the
beaverboard screen rolled out a big radio-phonograph and another jumbo bottle.
I held the bottle against the light. Still half full. I looked at my watch. He
rolled the radio against the wall and lifted the lid to get at the dials.

"Reach behind you, will you? The switch on the
wall." I could reach the switch without getting up, and I did. The lights
went out. I hadn't expected that, and I groped at arm's length. Then the lights
came on again, and I turned back, relieved. But the lights weren't on; I was
looking at the street!

Now, all this happened while I was dripping beer and trying
to keep my balance on a tottering chair—the street moved, I didn't and it was
day and it was night and I was in front of the Book-Cadillac and I was going
into the Motor Bar and I was watching myself order a beer and I knew I was wide
awake and not dreaming. In a panic I scrabbled off the floor, shedding chairs
and beer like an umbrella while I ripped my nails feeling frantically for the
light switch. By the time I found it— and all the while I was watching myself
pound the bar for the bar-keep—I was really in fine fettle, just about ready to
collapse. Out of thin air right into a nightmare. At last I found the switch.

The Mexican was looking at me with the queerest expression
I've ever seen, like he'd baited a mousetrap and caught a frog. Me? I suppose I
looked like I'd seen the devil himself. Maybe I had. The beer was all over the
floor and I barely made it to the nearest chair.

"What," I managed to get out, "what was
that?"

The lid of the radio went down. "I felt like that too,
the first time. I'd forgotten."

My fingers were too shaky to get out a cigarette, and I
ripped off the top of the package. "I said, what was that?"

He sat down. "That was you, in the Motor Bar, at eight
last night." I must have looked blank as he handed me another paper cup.
Automatically I held it out to be refilled.

"Look here-" I started.

"I suppose it is a shock. I'd forgotten what I felt
like the first time I ... I don't care much any more. Tomorrow I'm going out to
Phillips Radio." That made no sense to me, and I said so. He went on.

"I'm licked. I'm flat broke. I don't give a care any
more. I'll settle for cash and live off the royalties." The story came
out, slowly at first, then faster until he was pacing the floor. I guess he was
tired of having no one to talk to.

His name was Miguel Jose Zapata Laviada. I told him mine;
Lefko. Ed Lefko. He was the son of sugar beet workers who had emigrated from
Mexico somewhere in the Twenties. They were sensible enough not to quibble when
their oldest son left the back-breaking Michigan fields to seize the chance
provided by a NYA scholarship. When the scholarship ran out, he'd worked in
garages, driven trucks, clerked in stores, and sold brushes door-to-door to
exist and learn. The Army cut short his education with the First Draft to make
him a radar technician, the Army had given him an honorable discharge and an
idea so nebulous as to be almost merely a hunch. Jobs were plentiful then, and
it wasn't too hard to end up with enough money to rent a trailer and fill it
with Army surplus radio and radar equipment. One year ago he'd finished what
he'd started, finished underfed, underweight, and overexcited. But successful,
because he had it.

"It" he installed in a radio cabinet, both for
ease in handling and for camouflage. For reasons that will become apparent, he
didn't dare apply for a patent. I looked "it" over pretty carefully.
Where the phonograph turntable and radio controls had been were vernier dials
galore. One big one was numbered 1 to 24, a couple were numbered 1 to 60, and
there were a dozen or so numbered 1 to 25, plus two or three with no numbers at
all. Closest of all it resembled one of these fancy radio or motor testers
found in a super superservice station. That was all, except that there was a
sheet of heavy plywood hiding whatever was installed in place of the radio
chassis and speaker. A perfectly innocent cache for—

Daydreams are swell. I suppose we've all had our share of
mental wealth or fame or travel or fantasy. But to sit in a chair and drink
warm beer and realize that the dream of ages isn't a dream any more, to feel
like a god, to know that just by turning a few dials you can see and watch
anything, anybody, anywhere, that has ever happened —it still bothers me once
in a while.