Bradbury, Ray - SSC 13 (11 page)

 
          
“How
did you get around?”

 
          
“I
hitchhiked.”

 
          
“You
what?
”

 
          
“People
gave me rides on the road.”

 
          
“Remarkable.”

 
          
“I
imagine it sounds that way.” He looked at the passing houses. “So this is the
era of space travel, is it?”

 
          
“Oh,
we’ve been traveling to Mars for some forty years now.”

 
          
“Amazing.
And those big funnels, those towers in the middle of every town?”

 
          
“Those.
Haven’t you heard? The Incinerators. Oh, of course, they hadn’t anything of
that sort in your time. Had some bad luck with them. An explosion in Salem and
one here, all in a forty-eight-hour period. You looked as if you were going to
speak; what is it?”

 
          
“I
was thinking,” said Lantry. “How fortunate I got out of my coffin when I did. I
might well have been thrown into one of your Incinerators and burned up.”

 
          
“Quite.”

 
          
Lantry
toyed with the dials on the beetle dash. He wouldn’t go to Mars. His plans were
changed. If this fool simply refused to recognize an act of violence when he
stumbled upon it, then let him be a fool. If they didn’t connect the two
explosions with a man from the tomb, all well and good. Let them go on deluding
themselves. If they couldn’t imagine someone being mean and nasty and
murderous, heaven help them. He rubbed his hands with satisfaction. No, no
Martian trip for you, as yet, Lantry lad. First, we’ll see what can be done
boring from the inside. Plenty of time. The Incinerators can wait an extra week
or so. One has to be subtle, you know. Any more immediate explosions might
cause quite a ripple of thought.

 
          
McClure
was gabbling wildly on.

 
          
“Of
course, you don’t have to be examined immediately. You’ll want a rest. I’ll put
you up at my place.”

 
          
“Thanks.
I don’t feel up to being probed and pulled. Plenty of time in a week or so.”

 
          
They
drew up before a house and climbed out.

 
          
“You
want to sleep, naturally.”

 
          
“I’ve
been asleep for centuries. Be glad to stay awake. I’m not a bit tired.”

 
          
“Good.”
McClure let them into the house. He headed for the drink bar. “A drink will fix
us up.”

 
          
“You
have one,” said Lantry. “Later for me. I just want to sit down.”

 
          
“By
all means sit.” McClure mixed himself a drink. He looked around the room,
looked at Lantry, paused for a moment with the drink in his hand, tilted his
head to one side, and put his tongue in his cheek. Then he shrugged and stirred
the drink. He walked slowly to a chair and sat, sipping the drink quietly. He
seemed to be listening for something. “There are cigarettes on the table,” he
said.

 
          
“Thanks.”
Lantry took one and lit it and smoked it. He did not speak for some time.

 
          
Lantry
thought, I’m taking this all too easily. Maybe I should kill and run. He’s the
only one that has found me, yet. Perhaps this is all a trap. Perhaps we’re
simply sitting here waiting for the police. Or whatever in blazes they use for
police these days. He looked at McClure. No. They weren’t waiting for police.
They were waiting for something else.

 
          
McClure
didn’t speak. He looked at Lantry’s face and he looked at Lantry’s hands. He
looked at Lantry’s chest a long time, with easy quietness. He sipped his drink.
He looked at Lantry’s feet.

 
          
Finally
he said, “Where’d you get the clothing?”

 
          
“I
asked someone for clothes and they gave these things to me. Darned nice of
them.”

 
          
“You’ll
find that’s how we are in this world. All you have to do is ask.”

 
          
McClure
shut up again. His eyes moved. Only his eyes and nothing else. Once or twice he
lifted his drink.

 
          
A
little clock ticked somewhere in the distance.

 
          
“Tell
me about yourself, Mr. Lantry.”

 
          
“Nothing
much to tell.”

 
          
“You’re
modest.”

 
          
“Hardly.
You know about the past. I know nothing of the future, or I should say ‘today’
and day before yesterday. You don’t learn much in a coffin.”

 
          
McClure
did not speak. He suddenly sat forward in his chair and then leaned back and
shook his head.

 
          
They’ll
never suspect me, thought Lantry. They aren’t superstitious, they simply
can’t
believe in a dead man walking.
Therefore, I’ll be safe. I’ll keep putting off the physical checkup. They’re
polite. They won’t force me. Then, I’ll work it so I can get to Mars. After
that, the tombs, in my own good time, and the plan. God, how simple. How naïve
these people are.

 
          
McClure
sat across the room for five minutes. A coldness had come over him. The color
was very slowly going from his face, as one sees the color of medicine
vanishing as one presses the bulb at the top of a dropper. He leaned forward,
saying nothing, and offered another cigarette to Lantry.

 
          
“Thanks.”
Lantry took it. McClure sat deeply back into his easy chair, his knees folded
one over the other. He did not look at Lantry, and yet somehow did. The feeling
of weighing and balancing returned. McClure was like a tall thin master of
hounds listening for something that nobody else could hear. There are little
silver whistles you can blow that only dogs can hear. McClure seemed to be
listening acutely, sensitively for such an invisible whistle, listening with
his eyes and with his half-opened, dry mouth, and with his aching, breathing
nostrils.

 
          
Lantry
sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, and, as many
times, blew out, blew out, blew out. McClure was like some lean red-shagged
hound listening and listening with a slick slide of eyes to one side, with an
apprehension in that hand that was so precisely microscopic that one only
sensed it, as one sensed the invisible whistle, with some part of the brain
deeper than eyes or nostril or ear.

 
          
The
room was so quiet the cigarette smoke made some kind of invisible noise rising
to the ceiling. McClure was a thermometer, a chemist’s scales, a listening
hound, a litmus paper, an antennae; all these. Lantry did not move. Perhaps the
feeling would pass. It had passed before. McClure did not move for a long while
and then, without a word, he nodded at the sherry decanter, and Lantry refused
as silently. They sat looking but not looking at each other, again and away,
again and away.

 
          
McClure
stiffened slowly. Lantry saw the color getting paler in those lean cheeks, and
the hand tightening on the sherry glass, and a knowledge come at last to stay,
never to go away, into the eyes.

 
          
Lantry
did not move. He could not. All of this was of such a fascination that he
wanted only to see, to hear what would happen next. It was McClure’s show from
here on in.

 
          
McClure
said, “At first I thought it was the first psychosis I have ever seen. You, I
mean. I thought, he’s convinced himself, Lantry’s convinced himself, he’s quite
insane, he’s told himself to do all these little things.” McClure talked as if in
a dream, and continued talking and didn’t stop.

 
          
“I
said to myself, he purposely doesn’t breathe through his nose. I watched your
nostrils, Lantry. The little nostril hairs never once quivered in the last
hour. That wasn’t enough. It was a fact I filed. It wasn’t enough. He breathes
through his mouth, I said, on purpose. And then I gave you a cigarette and you
sucked and blew, sucked and blew. None of it ever came out your nose. I told
myself, well, that’s all right. He doesn’t inhale. Is that terrible, is that
suspect? All in the mouth, all in the mouth. And then, I looked at your chest.
I watched. It never moved up or down, it did nothing. He’s convinced himself, I
said to myself. He’s convinced himself about all this. He doesn’t move his
chest, except slowly, when he thinks you’re not looking. That’s what I told
myself.”

 
          
The
words went on in the silent room, not pausing, still in a dream. “And then I
offered you a drink but you don’t drink and I thought, he doesn’t drink, I
thought. Is
that
terrible? And I
watched and watched you all this time. Lantry holds his breath, he’s fooling
himself. But now, yes, now, I understand it quite well. Now I know everything
the way it is. Do you know how I know? I do not hear breathing in the room. I
wait and I hear nothing. There is no beat of heart or intake of lung. The room
is so silent. Nonsense, one might say, but I know. At the Incinerator I know.
There is a difference. You enter a room where a man is on a bed and you know
immediately whether he will look up and speak to you or whether he will not
speak to you ever again. Laugh if you will, but one can tell. It is a
subliminal thing. It is the whistle the dog hears when no human hears. It is
the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is
in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is
dead in it.”

 
          
McClure
shut his eyes a moment. He put down his sherry glass. He waited a moment. He
took up his cigarette and puffed it and then put it down in a black tray.

 
          
“I
am alone in this room,” he said.

 
          
Lantry
did not move.

 
          
“You
are dead,” said McClure. “My mind does not know this. It is not a thinking
thing. It is a thing of the senses and the subconscious. At first I thought,
this man
thinks
he is dead, risen
from the dead, a vampire. Is that not logical? Would not any man, buried as
many centuries, raised in a superstitious, ignorant culture, think likewise of
himself once risen from the tomb? Yes, that is logical. This man has hypnotized
himself and fitted his bodily functions so that they would in no way interfere
with his self-delusion, his great paranoia. He governs his breathing. He tells
himself, I cannot hear my breathing, therefore I am dead. His inner mind
censors the sound of breathing. He does not allow himself to eat or drink.
These things he probably does in his sleep, with part of his mind, hiding the
evidences of this humanity from his deluded mind at other times.”

 
          
McClure
finished it. “I was wrong. You are not insane. You are not deluding yourself.
Nor me. This is all very illogical and—I must admit—almost frightening. Does
that make you feel good, to think you frighten me? I have no label for you.
You’re a very odd man, Lantry. I’m glad to have met you. This will make an
interesting report indeed.”

 
          
“Is
there anything wrong with me being dead?” said Lantry. “Is it a crime?”

 
          
“You
must admit it’s highly unusual.”

 
          
“But,
still now, is it a crime?” asked Lantry.

 
          
“We
have no crime, no criminal court. We want to examine you, naturally, to find
out how you have happened. It is like that chemical which, one minute is inert,
the next is living cell. Who can say where what happened to what. You are that
impossibility. It is enough to drive a man quite insane.”

 
          
“Will
I be released when you are done fingering me?”