by Arthur Sellings
It is a well-known fact in editorial offices: American science-fiction writers have the scope and excitement, but their English opposite numbers own the insight and the wit. Like most well-known facts, it is riddled with more exceptions than one can count; but for proof of the second half of the proposition, Arthur Sellings reliably delivers perception and pleasure to us all.
This man was named Boyd Corry—the deed had been done by his press-agent, not his parents—and he was perfectly normal for a fading movie star, except for one thing. He thought the world was out to get him.
He wandered one night, as he had done many nights, through the downtown fog. He never said what it was he was looking for, but it was perfectly simple—he needed to be reassured. He needed to discover incontrovertibly that he existed and that he was loved. What it took to prove this was an old movie of his own.
In a second-run theater on a side street he found what he needed: An image of himself, twice as large as life and haloed in neon lights. He lurched into the lobby.
Cradled in the darkness inside, drugged by a travelogue commentary, he closed his eyes. His chin sagged. He slept. Then, like a Dalmatian responding to a fire alarm, his sleeping self heard the blare of trumpets that announced the opening credits of his motion picture and dutifully shook him awake. He sat up eagerly, in time to see the monumental letters that blazed on the screen:
ONLY ONCE IN ETERNITY
starring
BOYD CORRY
Tears started to his eyes.
That picture was all of three years old. Things had been different then, hadn’t they? Everyone at his feet. Before they’d seen what a selfless guy he was and had ganged up against him. Well, he’d shown them. Let them kick their heels for a couple of days. That might give them time to learn that the star was still the man who counted —not these jumped-up producers and directors.
And the public was on his side. A-ah, feel that stir in the audience as on the screen he came galloping over rolling greensward—as he swung, doubleted, lithely from the saddle.
This was what made everything worth-while. His public understood. They knew that the real artist crucified himself for their sake—for the sake of their dreams. It was the gossip columnists who didn’t understand—the narrow-nosed skunks.
The sense of injured virtue generated a maudlin glow that bathed him lovingly. Then he began to grow impatient, angered by the unbridgeable discrepancy between the face he saw there and the one that gaped at him every morning out of his shaving mirror.
He started to his feet, but dropped back, frowning at the screen. The frown deepened into a scowl. He shook his head dazedly and stared again.
Something was wrong.
The scene on the screen was not the one he had acted in. Impossible!
Then it dawned on him. They were getting at him again, the mangy tribe of columnists and jealous rivals and soulless executives. The ones that were always trying to get between him and his loyal public. Well, they weren’t going to get away with this.
He jumped to his feet, waving his arms wildly. “Turn it off! It’s all wrong! It’s a fake!”
Faces turned up whitely in the flickering darkness. People started to sssh, to yell back at him. The burly shadow of an attendant did a clumsy fandango along the row toward him.
“Turn it off!” Corry raved. “They’re cheating you, I tell you!”
The attendant reached him.
Twenty seconds later, Boyd Corry, no longer protesting, was being dragged like a sack up the aisle. A minute after that, the manager, who had picked up the phone to call the police, took another look at the profile that lolled against the back of a chair in his office. His eyes widened. Then, shaking his head sadly, he dialed Mammoth Studios.
* * * *
“But why?” Cavanagh lamented. “If you have to cut loose, why the hell don’t you come over to my place? You can get as drunk as you like there!”
“But you don’t understand, Vince,” Corry whined, wiping a clammy forehead with a trembling hand. “They’re getting at me again.”
Cavanagh’s sigh exploded like a swearword. “They! Can’t you get it into your handsome fat head that nobody’s getting at you? Everybody’s for you.” He knew that wasn’t exactly true, but he also knew that the few hundred people who would like to see the paranoid star toppled from an already shaky throne were not in league with each other. Not yet, anyway.
Corry laughed hollowly. “Oh yeah? Well, I saw it with my own eyes. They’re wrecking my pictures.”
Cavanagh looked tired. “This one’s been around, hasn’t it? A few feet always get scratched and have to be cut out.” He turned to the manager. “Isn’t that so?”
The manager nodded.
Corry glared at him. “It wasn’t just cutting, and you know it.” He turned back to Cavanagh. “I tell you, that picture was being murdered. It’s a plot to make me look ridiculous.”
Cavanagh looked at the manager, who shook his head blankly. Cavanagh nodded in sympathy.
Corry, stirring, caught the glance. “So you don’t believe me either? Well, I can prove it. You ought to know the film. You scripted it, didn’t you?”
“I scripted the first version,” Cavanagh agreed.
Corry persisted, “You remember that bit near the beginning where I’m fighting the Duke of Anjou’s mercenaries?”
Cavanagh rolled his eyes heavenward.
“Well, remember where I vault over the battlements and kill four men with one sweep of my—my—”
“Halberd?” Cavanagh prompted gently.
“That’s right,” Corry said eagerly. Then his face became savage. “In the version I just saw I miss the lot of them and fall flat on my—” He spluttered. “It was humiliating!”
Cavanagh turned to the manager. “Did you see this scene?”
The manager shifted feet. “No, I was busy out front. And this is the first day we’ve run the film. But there can’t be anything wrong with it. It came through the usual channels.”
“He’s lying,” Corry yelped.
Cavanagh waved him down but, to placate him, asked the manager, “Is there a chance that a wrong reel could have slipped in?”
“It’s extremely unlikely. Of course, I can check.”
“But it was me,” Corry broke in. “Well, a double. It’s a deliberate plot.”
“All right,” Cavanagh sighed. “Either you dreamed it, or there was something wrong with that reel. Will it satisfy you if I check it personally?” His eyes sought and received assent from the manager.
Corry scowled. “They’ve probably changed it by now.”
Cavanagh’s thin face registered sudden vehemence. “Of all the twisted paranoid— All right then, go ahead and believe there’s one huge conspiracy against you. In that case, there’s no point in my checking the reel. I wash my hands of it. And if I ever hear any more nonsense out of you, there will be a conspiracy against you. And I’ll be the one leading it.”
Corry squirmed. “Don’t say that, Vince. You’re the only true friend I’ve got.” His eyes were pleading. “You will check that reel?”
Cavanagh smiled a sad and inward smile. “Okay, but let that be the end of it.” He went to the door, opened it and beckoned outside. A genial tough rolled in. “Here, Mike, take Mr. Corry home, will you? And he said he’d like you to stay by him tonight.”
Mike grinned. “Sure thing, Mr. Cavanagh.” He hoisted Corry up and planted him on his feet in one effortless gesture.
Corry twisted back. “All right, Vince, but you’ll tell Drukker?”
“Only if there’s anything wrong with that reel,” Cavanagh called after him. He nodded to the manager, and they went up to the projection room. He examined the reel for a minute, then handed it back with a sigh. “Sorry about all that,” he murmured, and tipped the projectionist a five dollar bill.
He went out into the night air, pondering sadly.
* * * *
So it was that Simon Drukker, chief of Mammoth Pictures, was left untroubled by the affair—for a week.
Corry adopted what he called a “lofty disdain” toward the episode. In fact, his subconscious stored it furtively away as yet another item in the card-index of persecution with which he would confront his enemies the day that they went too far. As for Cavanagh, he bought the latest book on paranoia.
Then the call came.
Cavanagh and Corry both happened to be in Drukker’s expensively stark office. When Drukker made the substance of the call profanely clear, Corry gave Cavanagh a look of triumph.
“Anyway, why bother me with it, you raving idiot?” Drukker was roaring, when Cavanagh tapped him on the shoulder.
“I think you’d better be bothered,” Cavanagh cooed. “This isn’t the first time.”
Drukker glared, barked into the phone that the matter would be seen to, and slammed the receiver back. He turned to Cavanagh. “And why wasn’t I told?”
“And get that reception? Anyway, I didn’t believe it either.” He told Drukker briefly of the episode of a week before. He was conscious of Corry’s gloating over his shoulder.
The star elbowed in. “You see, somebody is getting at me.” (The enemy within was craftily calculating Drukker’s pretended ignorance. A query in red went against his name.)
Drukker only snorted. “Don’t overestimate yourself. You’re not in every picture this studio turns out.”
“You mean—”
“Somebody is getting at Mammoth.” Drukker’s bulk rose from the chair with surprising swiftness. “And that’s much more important.”
* * * *
Drukker, Cavanagh, Corry and Mike tumbled out of the car and almost collided with the manager who was jittering on the sidewalk. It wasn’t the same cinema, Cavanagh noted, but it was in the same district and the same kind of small neighborhood house.
“Something awfully screwy’s going on,” the manager blurted. “I’ve seen this picture five times. It’s one of my favorites. But—”
Drukker pushed brusquely past him. The other three tagged on.
Cavanagh’s knowledge of the picture was limited to having seen a few scenes in production, but it needed no previous acquaintance at all to realize, in a very few seconds, that there was something odd about it. Something decidedly odd.
For one thing, it was obviously designed to be a drama, right in the middle of the Stanwyck-Crawford-Wyman country. Coming from Mammoth, which had no claims on any of those estimable ladies, it featured Esther Fenn, with Allen Blaikie setting up the nasty situations for Esther to emote in.
At least, he should have been; but this was being played strictly for laughs.
Cavanagh was conscious, even in the darkness, of Drukker’s purpling. Yet the audience seemed to be enjoying it.
For himself, he had to admit that it was a lot more entertaining than the usual Fenn-Blaikie opus. Surely in the original version Esther, when she came across the bottle concealed by her alcoholic husband, would have struck her famous fold-arms-stroke-triceps pose, the code symbol for furious thought? She seemed about to do just that. Instead, she stopped, gave the audience a conspiratorial leer, then uncorked the bottle and helped herself to a generous swig.
The audience roared.
They roared even louder when Esther elegantly burped.
A strangled noise came from Drukker. “Turn it off!” he spluttered.
“But it’s nearly over,” the manager said, alarmed at what such an action might provoke.
It was. In came Blaikie, catching his wife taking a second swig. He calmly reached in his coat, brought out a gun, pointed it at Esther and pulled the trigger three times. She expired on the carpet.
What must have been the original score was still grinding out turgid chords in the background as the face of Allen Blaikie looked out of the screen. “Nobody,” he said, “steals my booze and gets away with it.”
The music mounted to a crescendo. It was The End.
The audience seemed to agree. They were still laughing as the lights came up. Drukker was already barging out of his seat, carrying all before him.
Cavanagh and Corry followed him up to the projection room.
“That’s the one,” Mike said as Drukker burst in. He nodded to a reel.
Drukker grabbed it, scanning the last footage at a rate that sent celluloid snakes writhing all over the confined space. A dumbfounded look spread over his large features. He handed the reel to Cavanagh as if in a bad dream.
And Cavanagh jumped at what he saw.
As far as he had thought it out, there had been a switch of reels—whether for a hoax or for darker reasons. Yet—the frames he was holding were obviously the right ones. There was a midget Esther stroking her triceps like mad.
Which meant—
He looked at Drukker. Drukker’s small eyes became even smaller as they came to rest on the operator. “Cavanagh, call my lawyer. Get him here right away. Nobody leaves this place until I find those phony reels.”
“Oh, yeah?” protested the operator. “I’m a union man. Either I get double time or—”
“You’ll get it,” Drukker snapped. Then, disgusted at his own magnanimity, he added menacingly, “Which may not be the only kind of time you’ll be concerned with before I get through here.”
Some time after two o’clock, Cavanagh and Drukker returned wearily to the latter’s offices. With them was Braun, the lawyer, a sharp-faced man with bushy black eyebrows. They gave him a top-heavy look. Corry had been sent home with Mike when Drukker had realized two things: first, that the star’s powers of solution were limited; second, that he was due on set at dawn for the last shots of his current picture.
“Well?” Drukker demanded as soon as they were inside. “When do I start getting some answers from the brains it costs me a small fortune to hire?”
Cavanagh turned from pouring a large whiskey. Braun patted his briefcase smugly. “Well, there’s at least a dozen counts we can sue on. Libel, infringement of copyright and trade mark, fraud—”
Drukker almost howled. “That’s a fat lot of good when we don’t know who’s doing it!”
“Well, this one instance isn’t anything to go haywire over,” said Cavanagh.
Drukker snorted. “Hasn’t it penetrated that bone head of yours that this could be the end of Mammoth?”
“Exactly. But every time it happens will be one more chance to find out how it’s being done.”
“Yeah? We didn’t get very far this time.”
“Perhaps,” Braun put in soothingly, “your technicians will find out something when they’re putting that projection room back together.”
“Well, if they didn’t find anything when they took it apart, I don’t see—”
The telephone bell cut across Drukker’s speech. He grabbed it. After a few seconds he put it back. “That,” he announced stonily, “was the technicians. They didn’t find a thing.”
“Well,” Cavanagh observed cheerfully, “then the interference doesn’t come from the projection room.”
“Then from where?”
“From the audience. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? If anybody was tampering with the projection system, the manager would have to be in on it, wouldn’t he? So why should he call you? No, it must be somebody in the audience.”
“But that’s fantastic!”
“So was what we saw tonight,” Cavanagh reminded him. He shrugged. “Though heaven knows how it’s done, or how anybody could make an apparatus portable enough.”
“So what do we do? Frisk everybody when they come out?” Drukker’s voice was scathing.
“No, nothing as crude as that. Just get camera apparatus fitted at every ticket-office of every cinema in town showing our films, so that a shot is automatically taken of everyone who buys a ticket. Sooner or later the number of faces common to each repetition of tonight’s performance will narrow down to one—or one group, if it’s a gang doing it.”
“But the cost!” Drukker wailed.
“Can you think of anything better?” Cavanagh asked him.
It took Drukker sixteen hours to decide that he couldn’t. Even then, it took another incident the very next evening to convince him. It happened at yet another cinema, and the report he got back really had him shuddering. What had happened to an ordinary light romance woke horrible visions of the studio’s being closed by the police for making indecent pictures. He signed the authority for the necessary apparatus with a sweaty hand.
* * * *
In the next fortnight four more cases of tampering were reported and shots of the cash customers duly rushed to the studio. By that time Drukker had learned something which went a little way to easing his torment.
Whoever was doing it wasn’t carrying on a vendetta against Mammoth alone. One by one the other major studios were finding themselves up against the same baffling problem.
Rumors began to fly. Cryptic notes started to appear at the foot of the film columns. The police raided one cinema, on a complaint of indecency, but found nothing.
Meanwhile the narrowing-down process went on. The first set of films yielded eight hundred and thirty-seven faces. The second set, sixty-one definite, and five not so definite, common with the first. The third, though it ruled out the five not-so-definites, showed up stubbornly with forty-three. “Real fans!” Drukker commented disgustedly.
But the last one, an afternoon performance, really narrowed the field down—to five. Drukker was all for acting and straightaway pouncing on all of them. Braun managed to restrain him with a reminder of what four damage suits could cause. .
And then the next report came in. Drukker summoned Cavanaugh, Braun, Crowe and Philp, together with Mike and a strong-arm squad.
The shots arrived. Drukker personally ran them through the projector. Minutes passed. One shot after another was passed over. Then one matched. Drukker marked the film strip, then started off again. The number left dwindled. A strip only inches long was left, then— the screen glared whitely.
Drukker ran back to the marked shot.
“That’s him,” he announced. “The enemy. Everybody take a good look. Right, let’s go.”
* * * *
On the way to the picturehouse, leading in one of three long black cars, Drukker made gloating noises from between cigar-clamping teeth.
“I’ll teach him to monkey with Mammoth,” he proclaimed to the world in general.
Cavanagh stirred. “But it’s not just Mammoth any more. I don’t get why—”
“Why I treat it as my personal pigeon?” Drukker chuckled. “I’ve always been a staunch defender of the film industry’s interests, haven’t I? The others know I’ve got a lead on this. I’m sure they’ll recognize the value of my efforts.” He chuckled again.
Cavanagh grimaced, knowing what that chuckle meant. Drukker was seeing a fat profit in the deal.
“Another thing,” Drukker said grimly. “The scheming skunk got me first. I’ll have a personal satisfaction in shaking the truth out of him.”
Cavanagh said nothing. He was thinking of the face they had just seen on the screen, thinking that Drukker sounded ridiculously melodramatic, talking like that about a little old man with a monk’s tonsure of white hair, who looked as if he wouldn’t harm a mouse. . . .
In the flesh he looked even smaller, frailer. His cheeks were pink and innocent as a child’s. Drukker spotted him as the crowds streamed from the cinema.
They pounced.
The little man looked up, startled.
“I’m Mammoth Pictures,” Drukker told him. “I made that picture you’ve been tampering with.”
The little man started to expostulate, then shrugged resignedly. “Well?”
“I think you owe us a visit, don’t you?”
“Do I? Oh, I see. Ah—tomorrow morning?”
“Right now.”
“But—my landlady. I always—”
“We’ll call your landlady,” said Drukker, steering him into the foremost car.
* * * *
The little man sat awkwardly in the canvas bucket with a hole that some expensive designer had called a chair. He looked up at the faces that ringed him.
“First,” said Drukker, “your name.”
“Alfred Stephens.”
Drukker nodded expectantly. “Now—how do you do it?”
The little man hesitated, then smiled slightly. “I don’t know.”
“What!” Drukker’s huge fists clenched. “Now look—”
“No, I mean it. Believe me, I don’t know.”
Drukker took a grip on himself. “All right, we’ll let that one ride. What do you use?”
“Use?”
“What do you do it with?”
“Why, nothing.”
Drukker spluttered. His eyes sought the strong-arm squad—A blue-jowled member lumbered over. Braun coughed nervously. Cavanagh slid in front of Mr. Stephens.
“Now—let’s all remember that Mr. Stephens is our guest. I’m sure that if we give him time to express himself—”
“Thank you,” said the little man, with a composure striking in one so frail. “If you will be good enough to point out to this gentleman that intimidation will not help, I will do my best to oblige.”
Drukker growled, met Cavanagh’s eye and subsided. He gestured to the goons to remove themselves to the anteroom.
“That’s better,” the little man said. “Now. You will understand if I speak with a certain reserve. I ask you to imagine a man who has been, all his life, a lover of the cinema. Let us imagine that he often gets impatient with what is offered him for his entertainment. He has seen films become more and more stereotyped, you understand?”
“Go on,” Drukker said heavily.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Oh, those cobwebbed situations, that weary old dialogue!”
“Do you know how much it costs to make a picture?” Drukker shouted, stung. Cavanagh grinned.
“Then they might as well be made properly,” Mr. Stephens said reprovingly. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Our critical friend begins to get discontented with a film. He starts thinking how it could be, and then—it happens.”
When Drukker became intelligible he was saying, “. . . trying to tell me the film goes off the rails because you think it off!”
Mr. Stephens clucked. “Because he thinks it off. The man I’m talking about.”
Drukker looked helplessly to Philp and Crowe. The two technicians closed ranks as if for mutual protection. Two pairs of shoulders rose and fell weakly.
“It could be,” Cavanagh put in, “some form of telekinesis.”
“Tele—what?”
“Telekinesis. Moving objects at a distance by the power of thought. Remember The Poltergeist? I did research for that. Cases are pretty well authenticated of people’s moving heavy vases, things like that. So why not somebody being able to move a collection of shadows on a screen?”
“But the sound’s changed, too.”
“Is that any harder?”
Drukker shook himself like a Labrador coming out of water. “No, it’s too fantastic. I’m not going to believe it.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Stephens promptly. “I’m glad. If that’s all, then—”
He started to rise. Drukker, coming to, pushed him back.
“All right,” he snarled. “I believe you. Now listen to me. You’re a nuisance in any cinema you enter,. More than that, there’s evidence that you’ve changed some films into—well, they’d never have got by the Hays Office like that.”
The little man’s cheeks became a shade pinker. “Ah yes. Well, perhaps our friend’s imagination did run rather wild.”
“Then he’ll have to stop it, won’t he?”
“Umm. Well, perhaps. It’s not that he’s of a particularly sensual nature, you understand? But love scenes on the screen do get tediously unreal, don’t you agree? Even in Theda Bara’s day they were wearing a bit thin, but at least there was something then.”
“I didn’t mean just the love scenes,” Drukker told him heavily. “I meant all of it.”
The little man looked at him regretfully. “But our friend can’t help it.”
“In that case,” said Drukker, “he’ll just have to stop going to the movies.”
The little man returned his gaze steadily. “But that’s out of the question.”
“Is it? We’ll see about that. My attorney here says that you can be sued on at least a dozen counts already. If you play ball with us, then we’ll play—” He jerked irritably. “Yes, Braun, what is it?”
“Intent,” Braun whispered urgently in his ear. “None of those charges would stick if we couldn’t prove intent.”
“But you told me—”
Mr. Stephens had sharp ears. “You’d need proof, too,” he interrupted blandly.
Drukker scowled. “All right, Mr. Stephens. What’s the price?”
“Price?”
“For staying out of picturehouses for the rest of your life.”
“Oh. Dear me, does everybody have a price in your world? I’m sorry, but my annuity is enough for me. And I haven’t any relatives living. In any case, I thought I had made my interest in the cinema clear enough. Nothing is worth sacrificing that for.”
The look of chagrin on Drukker’s face was suddenly replaced by a quite lifelike geniality. “Well, I can make you a happy man. A preview of every picture we make —right here at the studios. And any picture from any other company, I could arrange that. A car to pick you up. One of our starlets to keep you company. How’s that?”
Mr. Stephens sighed. “Well . . . no, I’m sorry, but that wouldn’t be the same thing at all. It’s not just the picture, you see, but . . . well, the atmosphere, the feeling of being one in a crowd, sharing the experience of hundreds of other people, the—yes, even the crackling of candy papers.”
“Candy papers!” Drukker raised his hands and dropped them wearily.
“Perhaps,” Cavanagh observed dryly, “you could offer Mr. Stephens a job as director. From what I’ve seen of his abilities—”
Drukker had started to glare. But now, suddenly, he was laughing. He shook the little man’s hand jovially, hoisting him to his feet at the same time.
“Well, that’s all right, Mr. Stephens. If we can’t reach agreement, then we can’t. And it’s skin off nobody’s nose. Glad to have met you. And good night.”
The rest looked on blankly as Drukker ushered a slightly bewildered Mr. Stephens to the door.
“Take Mr. Stephens home, Mike,” Drukker called out. “Good night again, Mr. Stephens.”
He closed the door on the little man and turned back benignly to the rest of them.
Cavanagh spoke quickly: “Listen, you’re not going to—”
Drukker looked pained. “I’m not going to do anything. Except to see that our friend has a bodyguard from now on. If he ever goes near a picturehouse, Mike, or whoever’s on duty, will just tip off the manager. It’s as simple as that.” He surveyed them with the air of a mother hen rebuking her brood. “So I don’t know what everybody was getting so steamed up about.”
* * * *
Cavanagh found the house—a modest rooming-place downtown, and paid off his cab. Mike was lounging against a lamppost, picking his teeth.
“Any sign?” Cavanagh asked.
“Hasn’t shown his face once.” Mike stirred morosely. “This private eye stuff gripes me.”
Cavanagh nodded sympathetically. “Enjoy your lunch?”
“Huh? Aw—” Mike threw away his toothpick disgustedly. “Just trying to kid myself. I don’t get a bite till Louie comes on at two.”
“I’ll take over, Mike, till then, how’s that?”
Mike beamed. “Gee, thanks, Mr. Cavanagh.” He lumbered off, but turned. “Don’t forget to ring Drukker if you move—”
“I won’t, Mike. Bon appétit.”
As soon as Mike was out of sight, Cavanagh went up the steps and rang the bell. The door was opened by a birdlike woman. He had just asked for Mr. Stephens when the little man himself came down the stairs. He had a topcoat on. “Oh, hello,” he said when he saw Cavanagh. Cavanagh thought he sounded rather tired.
“Remember me—Cavanagh? Mind if I tag along?”
“Won’t you be doing that anyway?” the little man asked with a wan smile.
Cavanagh nodded. “You worked that one out?”
“It didn’t take much working out. Ah, this way.” The little man sighed as they started off down the street. “What else could he do? I didn’t need to look out of the window this morning and see that palooka down below.”
“I’m not his relief,” Cavanagh thought it wise to explain. “Well, only voluntarily. Drukker looks on you as just a menace. But for me—well, I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking about that gift of yours. I’d like to know more about it.”
Mr. Stephens turned a quizzical eye on him. “Did Drukker tell you to say that?” Then, seeing the look on Cavanagh’s face, “Sorry. What do you want to know?”
“For one thing, has it only recently shown itself?”
“Well, I’ve an idea I’ve done it before—but only in snatches, so that I didn’t know at the time. You realize it wouldn’t be so easy to know. But looking back now I guess that—no, I know that it happened before. But not so anyone would notice. Even me.”
“And films are all you can move? Nothing else?”
The little man chuckled. “Levitate furniture, you mean? No, only films. I’ve never dabbled in anything out of the ordinary.”
“Out of the ordinary?” Cavanagh’s eyebrows rose. “What do you call what you can do, then?”
“Anything psi, I mean. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? Anyway, perhaps it isn’t so strange that it should happen to me. I’m a shy man. Worked all my life alone in a dispensary. Never married. Lived all to myself. Films are the only abiding love I ever had. I guess my will has got more and more focussed on the screen—-much more than most people’s.”
“Mmm,” Cavanagh pondered. “But that still leaves it a mystery.”
They walked along in silence for a time, then the little man said, “Well, there’s one thing—” He hesitated.
“Yes?” Cavanagh prompted gently.
“Well, I guess that what a man thinks decides what he can do. And I think a lot—philosophize, if that’s not too grand a word for it. Shy men are great philosophers. They’re really rationalizing away the chances that they lose to the—the—”
“The Drukkers?”
“I guess that’s what I mean. Anyway, I was always impressed by what old Plato said—about all the world that men see being no more than a lot of shadows thrown on a cave wall.”
“And the men who see them?” Cavanagh said quietly.
“I don’t know.” The little man smiled. “Just shadows with eyes, maybe. And don’t ask me what the fire that casts the shadows is. That’s going a bit deeper than I ever wanted to. But that way of looking at things is a big consolation to a man who never really amounted to much in his life. It tells him that all the things that people strive for—money, power, possessions—are only shadows.”
Cavanagh suddenly felt the loneliness of Mr. Stephens and his courage. The courage that faced up to the limitations of the being that housed it—the courage that could stand up to Drukker as the little man had done the night before. Cavanagh wasn’t used to expressing his true sentiments, not after ten years in Hollywood. But he said now, hesitantly, oddly shy himself, “But . . . you have amounted to something. This gift, surely, is something wonderful?”
“Maybe. Thank you for saying so.” He shrugged and seemed about to say something more, but stopped. He stopped walking, too.
Cavanagh looked up. They were outside a picture-house. It was very much like—yes, it was the very place where Corry had made that scene.
That had only been a few weeks ago, but it seemed an age now. Somehow the little man with the strange talent seemed to have introduced something wider— something of the eternal—between.
“I was going to the pictures,” Mr. Stephens said. “Coming in?”
Cavanagh shook his head sadly. “I hoped you wouldn’t make it difficult for me.”
“Ah, yes.” The little man fixed grave eyes upon him. “But Drukker doesn’t have the last word, you know. You see, if he tries to stop me, I shall simply give my story to the newspapers. They’ve already, I believe, got on to the fact that something odd has been going on. I think they will listen to me.”
“But would you want that? The publicity and everything?”
“Frankly, no. But it would be worth it to beat Drukker.”
“But what good would it do?”
“Only that. I told you I’d never had any experience of psi powers. There are plenty of people who have. They’ve evidently never thought of altering movies. If they have, I haven’t heard of it. Think what they might do if they knew it could be done. Like the four-minute mile.”
Cavanagh went suddenly pale. “No!” He grabbed the little man by the arm. “You don’t know Drukker. Do you think he’ll stand by and see his whole world tottering about his ears?”
The little man looked down, pained, at Cavanagh’s restraining hand. Shamefaced, Cavanagh let him go. The little man started to move toward the ticket-office.
“You fool!” Cavanagh shouted wildly. “I’ll have to call him.”
“If you have to,” Mr. Stephens said, turning. He looked sadly on Cavanagh. “I thought you had more guts.”
Cavanagh stood there a long moment. Then he hunched his shoulders and called Drukker.
Drukker’s reaction was immediate—and just what Cavanagh had feared it would be. Suddenly he knew that he had to get the little man out of danger.
He paid for a ticket with trembling hands and hurried inside.
The night scene was on the screen.
Outlaws, by the look of it, closing in on clustered wagons. The auditorium was dark. The usherette seemed to be engaged elsewhere. Cavanagh groped his way, cursing, down the aisle.
Then his eyes adapted to the dark.
The cinema was sparsely occupied, and quiet. He suddenly knew that the little man hadn’t started operating. He felt a vague unease. He told himself not to be a fool, that that didn’t mean a thing. Then he saw him. In the middle of the third row, his tiny figure hunched up in his coat.
Cavanagh started toward him—and jerked as the screen erupted noisily. Guns went off like lightning flashes. Cavanagh reached the little man—and stopped. His hand stretched out as if someone else was moving it.
The outlaws had attacked. Drukker’s goons would have no need to.
Little Mr. Stephens, his head lolling sideways, was dead.
* * * *
“Well,” said Drukker, turning to Cavanagh and Corry as they ducked the last flash-bulbs and entered their box, “this is all our picture tonight, eh?” He chuckled as he settled into his seat. “You know, little Mr. Stephens could have been a real nuisance.”
Corry beamed. The affair had had the strange effect on him of stilling his paranoid fears. By demonstrating that people plotted against other people than himself, the fact had registered on his subconscious that not everybody could therefore be plotting against him.
“Uh-huh,” Cavanagh said. It was two weeks now since Mr. Stephens’ sudden death; the inquest had returned a verdict of heart failure. Cavanagh had gone right out and bought a new book, on the guilt complex.
The lights dimmed.
The usual hubbub of a premiere died down, and Cavanagh resigned himself to the usual agony of a new Boyd Corry epic.
At least, he thought in an effort to make it bearable, Corry certainly throws himself into a role. It was almost as if he believed in this technicolored world of plaster turrets and knights-at-arms, strutting and i’faith-ing as if he thought he really was the Black Prince.
But the effort was drowned in a returning tide of revulsion. It was just that—Corry’s posturing and faked-up athletics—that made the whole spectacle insufferable.
If only—
He stiffened. On the screen the Black Prince was leaping onto his horse. But he never reached it. He missed the stirrup completely and fell flat on his face in the mud.
There was a sudden startled titter from the audience.
Then a gale of laughter swept the auditorium. For a moment Cavanagh’s world lost certainty. Had they had the wrong man in Mr. Stephens? So that the little man’s story had been a pack of lies? And then he realized—
What had the little man said that last afternoon of his life? That he’d tell the papers . . . that people hadn’t thought of it before . . . that it was like the four-minute mile; once people knew it could be done. . . .
But no, that couldn’t be it. There hadn’t been anything in the newspapers. But had he told anyone? Yes, that was it—he’d told somebody . . . wakened in them a latent power.
And then the truth impinged—shockingly.
He had to get out. Drukker and Corry were both gaping at the screen. They didn’t notice when he got up and made for the door.
For he had realized—it was just as the little man had said—the first time you weren’t sure. He hadn’t been for a moment—but he knew now. He had another’s experience to draw on. Mr. Stephens had told somebody—
Him!