The Illustrated Man (13 page)

“Have you talked about this to the psychiatrist?”

“So he could try to mortar up the gaps for me, fill in the gulfs with noise and warm water and words and hands touching me, and all that? No, thanks.” Hitchcock stopped. “I’m getting worse, aren’t I? I thought so. This morning when I woke up I thought, I’m getting worse. Or is it better?” He paused again and cocked an eye at Clemens. “Are you there? Are you 
really
 there? Go on, prove it.”

Clemens slapped him on the arm, hard.

“Yes,” said Hitchcock, rubbing his arm, looking at it very thoroughly, wonderingly, massaging it. “You were there. For a brief fraction of an instant. But I wonder if you are—
now.

“See you later,” said Clemens. He was on his way to find the doctor. He walked away.

A bell rang. Two bells, three bells rang. The ship rocked as if a hand had slapped it. There was a sucking sound, the sound of a vacuum cleaner turned on. Clemens heard the screams and felt the air thin. The air hissed away about his ears. Suddenly there was nothing in his nose or lungs. He stumbled and then the hissing stopped.

He heard someone cry, “A meteor.” Another said, “It’s patched!” And this was true. The ship’s emergency spider, running over the outside of the hull, had slapped a hot patch on the hole in the metal and welded it tight.

Someone was talking and talking and then beginning to shout at a distance. Clemens ran along the corridor through the freshening, thickening air. As he turned in at a bulkhead he saw the hole in the steel wall, freshly sealed; he saw the meteor fragments lying about the room like bits of a toy. He saw the captain and the members of the crew and a man lying on the floor. It was Hitchcock. His eyes were closed and he was crying. “It tried to kill me,” he said, over and over. “It tried to kill me.” They got him on his feet. “It can’t do that,” said Hitchcock. “That’s not how it should be. Things like that can’t happen, can they? It came in after 
me.
 Why did it do that?”

“All right, all right Hitchcock,” said the captain.

The doctor was bandaging a small cut on Hitchcock’s arm. Hitchcock looked up, his face pale, and saw Clemens there looking at him. “It tried to 
kill
 me,” he said.

“I know,” said Clemens.

Seventeen hours passed. The ship moved on in space.

Clemens stepped through a bulkhead and waited. The psychiatrist and the captain were there. Hitchcock sat on the floor with his legs drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped tight about them.

“Hitchcock,” said the captain.

No answer.

“Hitchcock, listen to me,” said the psychiatrist.

They turned to Clemens. “You’re his friend?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to help us?”

“If I can.”

“It was that damned meteor,” said the captain. “This might not have happened if it hadn’t been for that.”

“It would’ve come anyway, sooner or later,” said the doctor. To Clemens: “You might talk to him.”

Clemens walked quietly over and crouched by Hitchcock and began to shake his arm gently, calling in a low voice, “Hey there, Hitchcock.”

No reply.

“Hey, it’s me. Me, Clemens,” said Clemens. “Look, I’m here.” He gave the arm a little slap. He massaged the rigid neck, gently, and the back of the bent-down head. He glanced at the psychiatrist, who sighed very softly. The captain shrugged.

“Shock treatment, Doctor?”

The psychiatrist nodded. “We’ll start within the hour.” Yes, thought Clemens, shock treatment. Play a dozen jazz records for him, wave a bottle of fresh green chlorophyll and dandelions under his nose, put grass under his feet, squirt Chanel on the air, cut his hair, clip his fingernails, bring him a woman, shout, bang and crash at him, fry him with electricity, fill the gap and the gulf, but where’s your proof? You can’t keep proving to him forever. You can’t entertain a baby with rattles and sirens all night every night for the next thirty years. Sometime you’ve got to stop. When you do that, he’s lost again. That is, if he pays any attention to you at all.

“Hitchcock!” he cried, as loud as he could, almost frantically, as if he himself were falling over a cliff. “It’s me. It’s your pal! Hey!”

Clemens turned and walked away out of the silent room.

Twelve hours later another alarm bell rang.

After all of the running had died down, the captain explained: “Hitchcock snapped out of it for a minute or so. He was alone. He climbed into a space suit. He opened an airlock. Then he walked out into space—alone.”

Clemens blinked through the immense glass port, where there was a blur of stars and distant blackness. “He’s out there now?”

“Yes. A million miles behind us. We’d never find him. First time I knew he was outside the ship was when his helmet radio came in on our control-room beam. I heard him talking to himself.”

“What did he say?”

“Something like ‘No more space ship now. Never was any. No people. No people in all the universe. Never were any. No planets. No stars.’ That’s what he said. And then he said something about his hands and feet and legs. ‘No hands,’ he said. ‘I haven’t any hands any more. Never had any. No feet. Never had any. Can’t prove it. No body. Never had any. No lips. No face. No head. Nothing. Only space. Only space. Only the gap.’”

The men turned quietly to look from the glass port out into the remote and cold stars.

Space, thought Clemens. The space that Hitchcock loved so well. Space, with nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, a lot of empty nothings between, and Hitchcock falling in the middle of the nothing, on his way to no particular night and no particular morning. . . .

THERE WERE fireworks the very first night, things that you should be afraid of perhaps, for they might remind you of other more horrible things, but these were beautiful, rockets that ascended into the ancient soft air of Mexico and shook the stars apart in blue and white fragments. Everything was good and sweet, the air was that blend of the dead and the living, of the rains and the dusts, of the incense from the church, and the brass smell of the tubas on the bandstand which pulsed out vast rhythms of “La Paloma.” The church doors were thrown wide and it seemed as if a giant yellow constellation had fallen from the October sky and lay breathing fire upon the church walls; a million candles sent their color and fumes about. Newer and better fireworks scurried like tight-rope walking comets across the cool-filed square, banged against adobe café walls, then rushed on hot wires to bash the high church tower, in which boys’ naked feet alone could be seen kicking and re-kicking, clanging and tilting and re-tilting the monster bells into monstrous music. A flaming bull blundered about the plaza chasing laughing men and screaming children.

“The year is 1938,” said William Travis, standing by his wife on the edge of the yelling crowd, smiling. “A good year.”

The bull rushed upon them. Ducking, the couple ran, with fire balls pelting them, past the music and riot, the church, the band, under the stars, clutching each other, laughing. The bull passed, carried lightly on the shoulders of a charging Mexican, a framework of bamboo and sulphurous gunpowder.

“I’ve never enjoyed myself so much in my life.” Susan Travis had stopped for her breath.

“It’s amazing,” said William.

“It will go on, won’t it?”

“All night.”

“No, I mean our trip.”

He frowned and patted his breast pocket. “I’ve enough traveler’s checks for a lifetime. Enjoy yourself. Forget it. They’ll never find us.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

Now someone was setting off giant crackers, hurling them from the great bell-tolling tower of the church in a sputter of smoke, while the crowd below fell back under the threat and the crackers exploded in wonderful concussions among their dancing feet and flailing bodies. A wondrous smell of frying tortillas hung all about, and in the cafés men sat at tables looking out, mugs of beer in their brown hands.

The bull was dead. The fire was out of the bamboo tubes and he was expended. The laborer lifted the framework from his shoulders. Little boys clustered to touch the magnificent papier-mâché head, the real horns.

“Let’s examine the bull,” said William.

As they walked past the café entrance Susan saw the man looking out at them, a white man in a salt-white suit, with a blue tie and blue shirt, and a thin, sunburned face. His hair was blond and straight and his eyes were blue, and he watched them as they walked.

She would never have noticed him if it had not been for the bottles at his immaculate elbow; a fat bottle of crème de menthe, a clear bottle of vermouth, a flagon of cognac, and seven other bottles of assorted liqueurs, and, at his finger tips, ten small half-filled glasses from which, without taking his eyes off the street, he sipped, occasionally squinting, pressing his thin mouth shut upon the savor. In his free hand a thin Havana cigar smoked, and on a chair stood twenty cartons of Turkish cigarettes, six boxes of cigars, and some packaged colognes.

“Bill——” whispered Susan.

“Take it easy,” he said. “He’s nobody.”

“I saw him in the plaza this morning.”

“Don’t look back, keep walking. Examine the papier-mâché bull here. That’s it, ask questions.”

“Do you think he’s from the Searchers?”

“They couldn’t follow us!”

“They might!”

“What a nice bull,” said William to the man who owned it.

“He couldn’t have followed us back through two hundred years, could he?”

“Watch yourself, for God’s sake,” said William.

She swayed. He crushed her elbow tightly, steering her away.

“Don’t faint.” He smiled, to make it look good. “You’ll be all right. Let’s go right in that café, drink in front of him, so if he is what we think he is, he won’t suspect.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“We’ve got to. Come on now. And so I said to David, that’s ridiculous!” This last in a loud voice as they went up the café steps.

We are here, thought Susan. Who are we? Where are we going? What do we fear? Start at the beginning, she told herself, holding to her sanity, as she felt the adobe floor underfoot.

My name is Ann Kristen; my husband’s name is Roger. We were born in the year 2155 A.D. And we lived in a world that was evil. A world that was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not, to death, to fall over the edge of the earth and the sea into radioactive flame and madness.

They walked into the café. The man was staring at them.

A phone rang.

The phone startled Susan. She remembered a phone ringing two hundred years in the future, on that blue April morning in 2155, and herself answering it:

“Ann, this is Rene! Have you heard? I mean about Travel in Time, Incorporated? Trips to Rome in 21 B.C., trips to Napoleon’s Waterloo—any time, any place!”

“Rene, you’re joking.”

“No. Clinton Smith left this morning for Philadelphia in 1776. Travel in Time, Inc., arranges everything. Costs money. But, 
think—
to actually see the burning of Rome, Kubla Khan, Moses and the Red Sea! You’ve probably got an ad in your tube mail now.

She had opened the suction mail tube and there was the metal foil advertisement:

ROME AND THE BORGIAS!
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS AT KITTY HAWK!
Travel in Time, Inc., can costume you, put you in a crowd during the assassination of Lincoln or Caesar! We guarantee to teach you any language you need to move freely in any civilization, in any year, without friction. Latin, Greek, ancient American colloquial. Take your vacation in 
Time
 as well as Place!

Rene’s voice was buzzing on the phone. “Tom and I leave for 1492 tomorrow. They’re arranging for Tom to sail with Columbus. Isn’t it amazing!”

“Yes,” murmured Ann, stunned. “What does the Government say about this Time Machine company?”

“Oh, the police have an eye on it. Afraid people might evade the draft, run off and hide in the Past. Everyone has to leave a security bond behind, his house and belongings, to guarantee return. After all, the war’s on.”

“Yes, the war,” murmured Ann. “The war.”

Standing there, holding the phone, she had thought, Here is the chance my husband and I have talked and prayed over for so many years. We don’t like this world of 2155. We want to run away from his work at the bomb factory, I from my position with disease-culture units. Perhaps there is a chance for us to escape, to run for centuries into a wild country of years where they will never find and bring us back to burn our books, censor our thoughts, scald our minds with fear, march us, scream at us with radios . . .

They were in Mexico in the year 1938.

She looked at the stained café wall.

Good workers for the Future State were allowed vacations into the Past to escape fatigue. And so she and her husband had moved back into 1938, a room in New York City, and enjoyed the theaters and the Statue of Liberty which still stood green in the harbor. And on the third day they had changed their clothes, their names, and had flown off to hide in Mexico!

“It must be him,” whispered Susan, looking at the stranger seated at the table. “Those cigarettes, the cigars, the liquor. They give him away. Remember 
our
 first night in the Past?”

A month ago, their first night in New York, before their flight, drinking all the strange drinks, savoring and buying odd foods, perfumes, cigarettes of ten dozen rare brands, for they were rare in the Future, where war was everything. So they had made fools of themselves, rushing in and out of stores, salons, tobacconists, going up to their room to get wonderfully ill.

And now here was this stranger doing likewise, doing a thing that only a man from the Future would do who had been starved for liquors and cigarettes for many years.

Susan and William sat and ordered a drink.

The stranger was examining their clothes, their hair, their jewelry—the way they walked and sat.

“Sit easily,” said William under his breath. “Look as if you’ve worn this clothing style all your life.”

“We should never have tried to escape.”

“My God!” said William, “he’s coming over. Let me do the talking.”

The stranger bowed before them. There was the faintest tap of heels knocking together. Susan stiffened. That military sound!—unmistakable as that certain ugly rap on your door at midnight.

“Mr. Roger Kristen,” said the stranger, “you did not pull up your pant legs when you sat down.”

William froze. He looked at his hands lying on either leg, innocently. Susan’s heart was beating swiftly.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” said William quickly. “My name’s not Krisler.”

“Kris
ten,”
 corrected the stranger.

“I’m William Travis,” said William. “And I don’t see what my pant legs have to do with you!”

“Sorry.” The stranger pulled up a chair. “Let us say I thought I knew you because you did 
not 
pull your trousers up. Everyone does. If they don’t, the trousers bag quickly. I am a long way from home, Mr.—Travis, and in need of company. My name is Simms.”

“Mr. Simms, we appreciate your loneliness, but we’re tired. We’re leaving for Acapulco tomorrow.”

“A charming spot. I was just there, looking for some friends of mine. They are somewhere. I shall find them yet. Oh, is the lady a bit sick?”

“Good night, Mr. Simms.”

They started out the door, William holding Susan’s arm firmly. They did not look back when Mr. Simms called, “Oh, just one other thing.” He paused and then slowly spoke the words:

“2155 AD.”

Susan shut her eyes and felt the earth falter under her. She kept going, into the fiery plaza, seeing nothing.

They locked the door of their hotel room. And then she was crying and they were standing in the dark, and the room tilted under them. Far away firecrackers exploded, and there was laughter in the plaza.

“What a damned, loud nerve,” said William. “Him sitting there, looking us up and down like animals, smoking his damn cigarettes, drinking his drinks. I should have killed him then!” His voice was nearly hysterical. “He even had the nerve to use his real name to us. The Chief of the Searchers. And the thing about my pant legs. My God, I should have pulled them up when I sat. It’s an automatic gesture of this day and age. When I didn’t do it, it set me off from the others; it made 
him 
think, Here’s a man who never wore pants, a man used to breech uniforms and future styles. I could kill myself for giving us away!”

“No, no, it was my walk—these high heels—that did it. Our haircuts—so new, so fresh. Everything about us odd and uneasy.”

He turned on the light. “He’s still testing us. He’s not positive of us—not completely. We can’t run out on him, then. We can’t make him certain. We’ll go to Acapulco leisurely.”

“Maybe he 
is
 sure of us, but is just playing.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s got all the time in the world. He can daily here if he wants, and bring us back to the Future sixty seconds after we left it. He might keep us wondering for days, laughing at us.”

Susan sat on the bed, wiping the tears from her face, smelling the old smell of charcoal and incense.

“They won’t make a scene, will they?”

“They won’t dare. They’ll have to get us alone to put us in that Time Machine and send us back.”

“There’s a solution then,” she said. “We’ll never be alone; we’ll always be in crowds. We’ll make a million friends, visit markets, sleep in the Official Palaces in each town, pay the Chief of Police to guard us until we find a way to kill Simms and escape, disguise ourselves in new clothes, perhaps as Mexicans.”

Footsteps sounded outside their locked door.

They turned out the light and undressed in silence. The footsteps went away. A door closed.

Susan stood by the window looking down at the plaza in the darkness. “So that building there is a church?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve often wondered what a church looked like. It’s been so long since anyone saw one. Can we visit it tomorrow?”

“Of course. Come to bed.”

They lay in the dark room.

Half an hour later their phone rang. She lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“The rabbits may hide in the forest,” said a voice, “but a fox can always find them.”

She replaced the receiver and lay back straight and cold in the bed.

Outside, in the year 1938, a man played three tunes upon a guitar, one following another.

During the night she put her hand out and almost touched the year 2155. She felt her fingers slide over cool spaces of time, as over a corrugated surface, and she heard the insistent thump of marching feet, a million bands playing a million military tunes, and she saw the fifty thousand rows of disease cultures in their aseptic glass tubes, her hand reaching out to them at her work in that huge factory in the Future; the tubes of leprosy, bubonic, typhoid, tuberculosis, and then the great explosion. She saw her hand burned to a wrinkled plum, felt it recoil from a concussion so immense that the world was lifted and let fall and all the buildings broke and people hemorrhaged and lay silent. Great volcanoes, machines, winds, avalanches slid down to silence and she awoke, sobbing, in the bed, in Mexico, many years away. . . .

In the early morning, drugged with the single hour’s sleep they had finally been able to obtain, they awoke to the sound of loud automobiles in the street. Susan peered down from the iron balcony at a small crowd of eight people only now emerging, chattering, yelling, from trucks and cars with red lettering on them. A crowd of Mexicans had followed the trucks.

“Qué pasa?”
 Susan called to a little boy.