Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
And Now the News (35 page)
The next one was another handwritten note on the
Office of the Publisher
memo paper. “What did she keep them for?” Lance asked himself in amazement. Reluctantly, he admitted he knew the answer. He readâ
Ellie, for heaven's sakes answer your phone, or better still, let me see you. You know I would do anything on earth for you,
but thisâhoney, to ask for such a thing, even to want it, is insane. Revenge is childish anyway. Snap out of it, lamb. Get to work again and sweat it out of your system
.
Your own
       Â
Brill
.
Another pink carbon readâ
Work? How can I work? He has to be punished, Brill, destroyed. Revenge has nothing to do with it, and I'm surprised you should think of such a thing. It's just that, when someone helpless is hurt, someone strong punishes the wrongdoer for it. It's the way things are. And I thought you were the man strong enough. He has to be destroyed, Brill, or there can be no more Furilla, no more for you, no more, even, for us
.
Ellie
So neat, thought deMarcopolo, so orderly. All in sequenceâcarbon and second sheets, in moments of passion. He picked up another publishers' memo.
He readâ
Ellie, this has gone on long enough. I haven't seen you for weeks, and I'm frantic. Don't you know the Book Club contract deadline is almost on top of us now? You've just got to have the first draft of Furilla's Rose by contract time, or we'll lose the whole deal. Your own career is at stake. If you don't care about that, think about me
.
B. MacI
A pink carbon followed.
Everything I had to say to you I said in my last note. If you have it, read it again. If not, I'll send you a copy
.
E
Andâ
Ellie, you're not keeping copies!! Burn them, now. Oh, you're innocent, you've got to wake up and live in the real world, Ellie, I mean it!
Now listen, honey, I hadn't meant to tell you this, but I'm at the end of my rope. Everything I own is tied up in this business and, for years, I've been holding it together with my bare hands and a big bright smile, hoping against hope that the big best seller would come along. Well, it didâTo Bed, To Bed was it, and you wrote it
.
But a hole that deep takes a lot of filling up. Even sales like that couldn't do it, and I won't tell you how much I still owe. To make it worse, now that I have one big property, my creditors, people who for years just let things slide along, now suddenly want to take over. I can't let them, Ellieânot now, not at my age, not with real freedom, real solvency, right in my grasp for the very last time. All I need is one more big seller, and you've got it there for me, and you won't let me have it. Ellie, I beg you, on my knees I beg you, finish the book!
Brill
.
I hate pink
, thought deMarcopolo with sudden fury. He controlled the hand which wanted to crush the pink sheet and readâ
I have said all I can say. I enclose a copy of it. Read it again
.
E
.
A telegramâits porous yellow startled him like an explosion.
ONLY TEN DAYS TO CONTRACT TIME FOR HEAVENS SAKE ELLIE AT LEAST LET ME SEE YOU
BRILL MaCIVER
And then, the shortest pink carbon of allâ
Read it again
.
E
.
DeMarcopolo picked up the next one,
Office of the Publisher
, squinted at it, then set the box down on the floor and stood up. He moved to the window, leaned into the light and spelled out the writing slowly, his lips moving. It was scratched and scrawled, the paper crumpled, speckled with ink-flecks where the pen had dug in and splattered.
I must be crazy, and I wouldn't wonder. Nothing seems realâyou, soft little you, holding out like that for such a thing, I listening to it. No money, no business in the world, is worth a thing like this, I keep telling myself, but I know I'm going to do it. Try
Down at the bottom of the memo sheet was a wavery series of scrawls which at first seemed like the marks one might make to try out a new penâa letter or two, a series of loops and zigzags. But as he stared at it, it became writing. As nearly as he could make it out, it readâ
I did, and he didn't know why. My blood damns you ellie
.
Lance deMarcopolo turned like a sleepwalker and slowly put the crumpled memo down on the pile of papers he had already gone through. He stood still, swaying slightly, then moved unsteadily toward the corner where the telephone squatted on the floor, like a damsel in a hoopskirt. He picked it up, held the receiver to his ear. It was still connected. He dialed carefully. A cheerful female voice said, “Post-Herald.”
“Get me Joe Birns â¦Â Joe? Lance here.”
“Hi, y'old bibliophile! Don't tell me you're getting' cold feet, old man. Call the whole thing off and give your old pal a scoop.”
“Knock it off, Joe.”
“Hey! 'Sa matter, Lance?”
“Joe, you can find things out without anybody knowing who's asking.”
“Shucks, Lance, sure. What'sâ”
“BrillâMacIver BrillâI want to know what happened to him.”
“Brill? He's dead.”
“I know, I know.” It seemed, somehow, hard to breathe. “I mean, I want to know how he died. And somebody else tooâhold on.” He put the phone down on the floor and walked back to the box. He pawed through the papers for a moment, then returned to the phone. “Joe?”
“Yuh?”
“Somebody called Hobart Hennigar. I think he's dead too.”
“Hobart Hennigar,” murmured Joe like a man taking notes. “Who dat?”
“That's what I want to know. Call me back, will you Joeâfast?” He read the number off the telephone.
“Sure Lance. Hey Lance, are youâis there anything â¦?”
“Yes, Joeâfind me that information.” Lance hung up.
He looked vaguely about the room, everywhere but at the box. Yet, ultimately, he went back to it, inevitably drawn. Slowly, he sat down and picked it up, still not looking at it. His hands found the unread portion and slid over it like a blind man's. At last he lowered his eyes and looked.
It was only manuscript:
 â¦Â and threw on the gold hostess gown. When the old man opened the door she stood like a flame, eyes like coals, hair afire in the golden morning. “Maserac, Maserac, he's killed me!”
And she told him, told him all of it, each syllable torn from her, agonized yet strangely eager, for each syllable brought her closer to the comfort she knew that her dear friend would somehow have for her. And, when at last she had finished, she ran to him, blind with tears, and hid in his arms
.
“My dear, my poor little bird,” said Maserac. His arms closed around her. “Try to forget, Furilla. Tonightâtomorrowâthis will be a world in which Harald does not exist.” He put her firmly from him, looked for a long time into her eyes, then
slowly turned to the door
.
“Maserac, Maserac, what are you going to do?”
“Do?” He smiled gently. “Surely there is only one thing to do. How could there be a choice?”
He left her
.
In the morning, they found Harald's tattered body slumped in his cabin. And Maserac, dear Maseracâhis fury had crushed, not only Harald, but his own great heart, his dear, dear heart. He lay in an open field, his slack hand still on the horsewhip, his unseeing eyes turned to the sunrise, and Furilla knew that her name lay silent on his dead lips
.
“Yeah,” whispered deMarcopolo. The sound was like sighing. “That was the way the thing came out in the book.”
Everything came out for Furilla. All the world loved Furilla, because things always happened the way they should for Furilla.
“Yeah,” he said again, still in a whisper.
Furilla, he reflected, never did anything to make things come her way. She did it just by being soft little, sweet little, innocent little Furillaâbeing Furilla beyond all flexibility, beyond all belief.
The phone rang.
“Yes, Joe.”
Joe said, “I don't know just what details you want about Brill. There's a good deal that wasn't in the papers, though. He went on a wing-ding and disappeared for two days. They shoveled him up out of a doorway down in the waterfront district. He was full of white lightning, but whether that killed him or his pump was due to quit anyhow is a toss-up. That what you wanted?”
“Close. What about the other one?”
“Took a little digging. Now HennigarâHobart Hennigar, thirty-seven, instructor in English lit and creative writing at some Eastern college, thrown out three years ago for making a pass at a housemaid. Fast talker, good looker, fairly harmless. One of these literate bums. Knocked around, one job to another, wound up out at the lake, caretaker on a big estate. Ties in with MacIver, in a way, LanceâMacIver had a place out there too, little lodge. Used to hole up there
once in a while.”
“Was he out there during his drunk?”
“If he was, no one could prove it. Off season, pretty lonesome out there. Anyway, this Hennigar got himself plugged through the head. Police report says it was a twenty-five target-type bullet.”
“Fight?”
“Na! Back of the head, from a window in his cabin. He never knew what hit him, not a clue. Lanceâ”
“Mm?”
“You got a lead on that killing?”
DeMarcopolo looked slowly around the room. The telephone said, “Lance?” and he held it away from him and looked at it as if he had never seen it before.
Then he brought it back and said, “No, I haven't got a lead on that killing. Joe, do something for me?”
“Shucks.”
“You covering that thing of mine?”
“Statement at the airport, kissin' picture? Couldn't keep me away.”
“Iâwon't be there,” said deMarcopolo. “Tell her for me, will you?”
“Lance! What's hapâ”
“Thanks, Joe. 'Bye.” He hung up very quietly.
After a time he crossed to the small pile of things by the door and picked up the note she had left him and his picture. He tore up the note and took out the picture and tore it in two. He folded the frame over the torn paper and tossed it over the string marked THROW OUT. That left the new box marked WIP staring at him.
He recoiled from it with horror and went on out. Shutting the door, he said conversationally, “How innocent can you get?” He said it to MacIver, to Hennigar, to Eloise Michaud and to Lancelot deMarcopolo. But nobody had an answer for him.
T
HE MAN
'
S NAME WAS
M
AC
L
YLE
, which by looking at you can tell wasn't his real name, but let's say this is fiction, shall we? MacLyle had a good job inâwellâa soap concern. He worked hard and made good money and got married to a girl called Esther. He bought a house in the suburbs and after it was paid for he rented it to some people and bought a home a little farther out and a second car and a freezer and a power mower and a book on landscaping, and settled down to the worthy task of giving his kids all the things he never had.
He had habits and he had hobbies, like everybody else, and (like everybody else) his were a little different from anybody's. The one that annoyed his wife the most, until she got used to it, was the news habit, or maybe hobby. MacLyle read a morning paper on the 8:14 and an evening paper on the 6:10, and the local paper his suburb used for its lost dogs and auction sales took up forty after-dinner minutes. And when he read a paper he read it, he didn't mess with it. He read Page 1 first and Page 2 next, and so on all the way through. He didn't care too much for books but he respected them in a mystical sort of way, and he used to say a newspaper was a kind of book, and so would raise particular hell if a section was missing or in upside down, or if the pages were out of line. He also heard the news on the radio. There were three stations in town with hourly broadcasts, one on the hour, one on the half-hour, and one five minutes before the hour, and he was usually able to catch them all. During these five-minute periods he would look you right in the eye while you talked to him and you'd swear he was listening to you, but he wasn't. This was a particular trial to his wife, but only for five years or so. Then she stopped trying to be heard while the radio talked about floods and murders and scandal and suicide. Five more years, and
she went back to talking right through the broadcasts, but by the time people are married ten years, things like that don't matter; they talk in code anyway, and nine-tenths of their speech can be picked up anytime like ticker-tape. He also caught the 7:30 news on Channel 2 and the 7:45 news on Channel 4 on television.
Now it might be imagined from all this that MacLyle was a crotchety character with fixed habits and a neurotic neatness, but this was far from the case. MacLyle was basically a reasonable guy who loved his wife and children and liked his work and pretty much enjoyed being alive. He laughed easily and talked well and paid his bills. He justified his preoccupation with the news in a number of ways. He would quote Donne:
“â¦Â any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind ⦔
which is pretty solid stuff and hard to argue down. He would point out that he made his trains and his trains made him punctual, but that because of them he saw the same faces at the same time day after endless day, before, during, and after he rode those trains, so that his immediate world was pretty circumscribed, and only a constant awareness of what was happening all over the earth kept him conscious of the fact that he lived in a bigger place than a thin straight universe with his house at one end, his office at the other, and a railway track in between.