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Izzinius Fox comes out of the Astor Place station of the Lexington Avenue IRT blinking, slightly bedazzled by the sun, choking apprehensively on fumes which trucks exude as they stagger up lower Park Avenue. He takes a brief orienta-tional stare at John Wanamaker's, then strikes out purposefully for the Book Stall; his stride twinkling powerfully against the routine background. Still shaken by his encounter on the South Ferry local with the Rhelm people, he tries to now put it out of his mind, concentrate on the goods he expects shortly to find; but the last words of the Arch-Leader himself ring in his mind, overtaking the thinner and more familiar thread of the Izzinius Fox stream-of-consciousness.
"Be reasonable," the Arch-Leader is saying. "Come on now, it's not only for our sake but for the sake of all the peoples of your planet we only want to liberate. We're going through this too often already, Fox. Now the time has come for stronger measures. Will you or will you not give us the article?"
"No," Fox had said with all the firmness he could manage, choking meanwhile on the fumes within the spacecraft. "No I won't; you see, I still don't believe you."
"Don't believe us, eh?" the Arch-Leader had said in a terrible voice while the surrounding and lesser aliens mumbled. And Fox had felt a thrill of terror go through him at the sudden force in the monster's tone. "Can't believe us after all we've done for you? Well, we'll have to take severe measures then, Fox; severe measures indeed."
And then Fox had been out of the ship, spiraling gracefully back to Earth again to find himself in the clattering subway as it eased into the Astor Place stop. It had been a numbing experience; surely the most threatening since the aliens had somehow seized his mind two weeks ago. And he resolved to himself right then that if it didn't stop soon he would have to, against all his principles, probably seek professional help. Now, however, it is already somewhat pushed away: he is concentrating on the Book Stall. And as he goes into the musty interior, and toward the small alcove in the back where Stuart Wiseman maintains his science-fiction collection, Fox gives way to the earlier mood of the day which had been bright: Stuart had phoned him to say that a February 1948 Tremendous had come in.
"Is it there?" Fox asks, as he comes into the alcove to find Stuart sitting perched calmly on his chair, reading an old issue of Terrific Terran Stories under a reading lamp. "No one took it did they?"
Stuart gives him a long easy smile—really a great guy for all his small nastiness—takes off his glasses, rubs his hands, and says: "I promised it to you, Fox; isn't that good enough? It's right here." He takes from beneath him a mint edition of the precious Feb. '48 Tremendous, the famous Balsch cover glowing blue at him; the familiar logotype clear and plain.
"Came in last night," he says. "Some guy over in Benson-hurst sold out his collection; he's getting married. Few months later he's going to buy the whole thing back but he doesn't want his wife to get the wrong ideas about him."
Fox takes the magazine from Stuart's hands, his own fingers trembling slightly as he runs them over the glistening cover, the slightly raised impression coming through to him; then turns it over to find that the back cover has a rip. Nothing very serious, but a clear deadly indentation running down the middle of the Audell Auto Manual advertisement. "How did this happen?" he says. "I thought you said mint."
"It's mint. Back cover means nothing. You can't even see that tear. Besides, I can't be responsible for what happens to a magazine when a guy packs it. Do you want it or not?" Stuart says and half stands from the stool, adjusts the string on the dim overhead lamp which provides the only faint illumination back here and then sits, closing his copy of Terrific. "I mean, I gave you first offer because I know you needed that one to fill, but there are plenty other guys who I could have called, any one of whom—"
"Oh," Fox says, "oh, I'll take it." The possibility that the issue might be taken from him fills him with dread. Rip or no, he needs this one desperately to clear his files of Tremendous through 1948; with it he can go clear back to June 1947. (May 1947 is another rare issue.) "Is it a dollar, right, the usual price?"
"No," Stuart says, "it's got to be a little more for this one. I paid double my usual to get it because of the condition and the guy didn't want to give this copy away anyway." Stuart winks at Fox, says, "He said he knew it was a rare issue, and he wanted to hold onto it for starting a new collection which he says he is going to do just as soon as his wife gets used to his way. This one's gotta be three dollars."
"Three dollars?" Fox says. It will be the most he has ever paid for a magazine, excepting always the ten dollars he paid Stuart six weeks ago for vol. 1, no. 1 of Thoughtful Stories, mint condition, just as it came out of the plant. But vol. 1, no. 1, as Stuart himself had told him, was always an investment: fully guaranteed to go up immediately in value from the very day you bought it, hardly a magazine at all in that sense. But three dollars for a routine, barely three-year-old issue of Tremendous is something else again.
Fox takes out his wallet, considers the thing carefully. He is due, of course, to sign for another unemployment check this afternoon and in the bargain he is still five dollars below his weekly budget. But there is the question of extra rent coming up because his landlord installed a window in his furnished room and also he has the feeling more and more now of disappearing margins—edges being approached. He has been out of work for three months.
"Look," he says, "can I pay you two dollars today and the other dollar next week? I'm a little bit short."
"I'm sorry," Stuart says—to show that he is hardly sorry at all. He is a nice guy but there is simply little give in him.
"It's not that I don't trust you, Izzie. It's just that I've got a very solid item here; you don't get many of these around and for anyone else the price would be five dollars. I only gave you first crack, you know, because you're such a customer and I happened to know that you had a special need for this one and had the request in… but it's not fair to the others to give you a break on a low price. Not when they're all waiting. I got three calls this week from customers saying 'Got the Feb. '48 Tremendous in?' Matter of fact, I could kind of use this baby myself, you know, for my personal files; it being a rare issue and all that. It's okay, Izzie, you can pass it up, even after my making a special point of calling you this morning and holding it on reserve and so on. I don't care. I take a lot of trouble for certain customers only to get disappointed."
"No!" Fox says and realizes with some embarrassment that he has screamed; three old ladies prowling in the outer bookstore's Marriage & Childbirth section look at him with bright and victimized loathing. He lowers his voice and says, "Stuart, please Stuart, I'll take it."
Removing three dollars from his wallet, he puts the money in Stuart's palm and then snatches the magazine away before Stuart can think better of the deal. The thought of actually losing it after agonizingly having searched out this issue for months appalls him; he holds it lovingly. A strange heat seems to curl up from it as it slides so easily, so inevitably into his palms: a beautiful melding. He knows that he and this particular issue were made for one another, and he opens the contents page, looks at the familiar names and stories, and feels himself tingling with narrow anticipation. It was really an excellent issue; and in particular he can hardly wait to read Cupboard's "The Green Death": the first and (reportedly) the best of the Space-Surgeon-in-exile series under Cupboard's pseudonym of Ronnie Lafebvre.
"Thanks Stuart," he says hoarsely. "I really appreciate this."
"Oh, it's my pleasure, Izzie. Want to look over the stock? We just got some new Thoughtfuls in."
"No thanks," Fox says. Thoughtful and Thrilling are the two newer science-fiction magazines, both started only a year or so ago. Although they have more "prestige" than Tremendous, as well as most of the old Tremendous contributors, Fox has for them only a dull kind of loathing, a feeling of disconcerted loyalty to Tremendous itself which for a decade or more was the jewel of all the science-fiction magazines and which will endure forever. He thinks vaguely for a moment of talking to Stuart about the Rhelm people, what they are doing to him, the strange events of the last couple of weeks. But Fox decides against it: Stuart could probably not understand this and in the bargain might take him for being insane—risky business when you are trying to live a normal twenty-three-year-old life in New York City.
"Well thanks," he says. "I guess I'll be in again toward the end of the week you know. Call me if the May '47 Tremendous comes in."
"Sure," Stuart says. "Incidentally, there's a meeting of the Solarians next Thursday. If you'd like to make it I'd be happy to take you over. They're going to discuss the early work of Teck Jones and I think you'd enjoy it."
"Stuart," Fox says. "Stuart, I told you about those things. I don't want to go. I'm not a fan, I'm a collector." Fox is dimly aware, of course, that there exists a whole substructure of people who not only accumulate the magazines but gather to talk about them socially and that these people are called "fans." But beyond a kind of puzzled revulsion he has no other feelings, certainly no curiosity. "Not that I don't appreciate the offer," he says.
"Well, it's up to you, Izzie. There's a whole wonderful group of people who feel just the way we do and like to get together to talk about it. But, hell, I can't force you." Stuart winks. "Bet you can't wait to go home and put that thing on the shelf, right?"
Fox gulps, nods in embarrassment, looks down at the floor feeling quite discombulated. Stuart is the only one who really understands him—that is a truth.
"Right," he says. "But I'll want to read it first, of course."
"Well, good luck then," says Stuart. "Enjoy it, it's a nice issue anyway," and returns to the issue of Terrific, belching slightly.
Disconcerted as always by the strange and rapid way which Stuart has of terminating conversations—it is as if Stuart loses interest in the whole thing the moment a deal is made—Fox backs out of the alcove smiling, dodges the old ladies who have now somehow drifted into the Medical Textbook section, and goes out into the street. The slight, thin warmth of the magazine in his armpit fills him with a vague feeling of elevation which, were it not for his other problems, would pass for euphoria. It really has been a good morning, an extraordinary piece of luck and decent weather in the bargain.
On the street he plows toward the subway again. But before he reaches it the Rhelm people—goddamn those sons of bitches anway—snatch him up again and take him far away from there. It is all he can do in his rage and surprise to hold tightly onto the precious magazine so that that at least the ungrateful bastards will never be able to take away from him. It is really too much. This thing has been going on too long. And if there were a way that he knew to stop it he certainly would. Unfortunately, events are far outside of his control—something having to do not only with the Rhelm people but with other happenings long before he met them, which tends to make them, in one particular sense anyway, almost corollary.
He finds himself sitting neatly in the interrogation chair; a cluster of aliens again around him; the Arch-Leader sitting opposite in one of those strange, tentacled contrivances which are the only means by which they can sit normally. He is passed a pack of cigarettes, takes one, has it lit courteously by a nodding alien who seems, somehow, to be smiling. Of course it is difficult to tell. The thing about the aliens is that they are so irretrievably distant from any normal point of reference that what he considers courtesy may be, for all he knows, an expression of murderous impulse.
"Now you listen to me, Fox," the Arch-Leader says. "You are not being reasonable. You know that. I hate to keep on summoning you this way, but we really have to bring this to some kind of resolution—and quickly."
"No," Fox says stubbornly, biting his lips and shaking his head. He is a limited man, he knows; but he has a certain streak of courage. If they tortured him, of course, that would put things into a different context—then he would do anything for them. But he found out early in the game that the aliens have no power other than to bring him into the spaceship and make threats; they cannot even, for some reason, retain him for more than ten minutes at a spell due to some kind of psychic energy loss or the equivalent. Helpless against his refusals then, they can only try to persuade; but he must admit that the persuasions have been getting on his nerves. He does not know if his capacity to resist is strictly unlimited.
"I told you, it's hopeless to argue with me, I won't do it."
"To recapitulate…" the Arch-Leader says.
He has a peculiar habit, this one, of doing this almost every time Fox is summoned: going back to the reasons for the aliens' presence and their goals and motives and progress and so on. Perhaps it is only part of their civil service procedure: the Arch-Leader having let drop early on that the entire invading crew were composed of middle-level technocrats on the home planet, who carried on their assignment in terms of certain routine procedurals and directives, and had to petition Headquarters for any prospective change.
Then, too, Fox is aware this habit of the Arch-Leader is very similar to the plotting of many stories he has read in Tremendous—in which people were always sitting over desks and bringing each other up to date for the reader's convenience: "… forty years ago, the Hobbs Projector had been introduced and had made transmission to distant worlds immediately within everybody's range," Patrick said. He went on to remind Donovan that there had been enormous feuds, fires and famine in the early days of the Hobbs Process but. ..
"To recapitulate, Izzinius Fox, twenty-three year old of the planet Earth, we have come from our home star of Guelph to inaugurate a new era of peace and progress among the peoples of your planet and to educate you into joining the Great Galactic Federation—which will free you forever from the ravages of war, starvation, misery, depression, and loneliness. We have contacted you since we can approach Earth only through a single intermediary and felt you likely. According to the policies and procedures, you must bring to us one copy of the important written materials we request —materials which are the keyword, so to speak, for our making peaceful contact with your race.
"You have refused and refused us, probably because you feel that we do not have the best interests of your planet at heart and are really destructive in intent. We have tried to plead with you, reason, persuade, cajole—all to no effect. And now our time is almost gone. We must complete our mission or return in disgrace. I am happy to say that we have now received directive 4-122B from Headquarters in answer to our own petition form 14XZ, which enables us to take more direct action if necessary. Now think this over,
Izzinius Fox, because time for all the parties is running extremely short."
"I just don't believe you," Fox says, struggling to rise and then settling back with a sigh. "I mean, it's nothing personal, but I can't get away from the feeling that you're just being very cunning and intend to take us over somehow. Probably you're a group of mercenaries doing this on a flat rate."
"We must have the writings shortly," the Arch-Leader says, ignoring this. "We give you one cycle of your own time to present them to us. If you do not, we will then have to take stringent and coercive measures. Are there any questions?"
"Why me?" Fox says, which is an old response. "There are two billion of us down there."
"Because we believed that your love for science fiction would make you tolerant and we felt that your devotion to this mind-broadening kind of adventure fiction would make you a knowledgeable contact. Oh, boy, were we ever wrong!" the Arch-Leader says with what Fox takes to be a bitter twist of his eating cavity, and then raises a tentacle. "Nevertheless, our time is running short. Have you decided to be reasonable or not?"
"I don't know," Fox says sullenly. His initial panic has long since been given over to resignation, monotony, and a dull, pervasive feeling of entrapment, which is really so little different from what he has gone through during other, more mundane periods of his life. "You've never made your position very clear to me, you know. Besides, I've always had the feeling that I might be dreaming this; in which event, of course, I'm completely insane and nothing I'm saying to you applies any meaning whatsoever. But I don't think I'm insane."
"Oh, you are not. You are definitely not: you of all people, a far-ranging, wide-reading man in your popular field of science fiction should be able to accept the unknown without doubting yourself. You are totally rational. Anyway," the Arch-Leader says sadly, "this is really getting us nowhere and is just working into the dry, deadly repetition of our previous conferences. We cannot hold you any longer and the next time we expect that you will be more cooperative. Would you like me to introduce you to my daughter who is on shipboard through special dispensation of Headquarters? She's really attractive, for one of the Rhelm people that is, and if I thought it would do us any good at all, I'd try to have her seduce you. You know the way it is."
"No thanks," Fox says, feeling his ears redden. "I don't think that we look attractive to you, either. Besides, I've never had too much to do with girls; you know, girls on Earth, I mean, or like that."
"Well, then," the Arch-Leader says and presses a button.
Fox feels himself whisked away with enormous speed and force and then reassembles on the East Side local uptown now huffing into the Fifty-ninth Street station. Two high-school girls stare at him uneasily as he shifts on the seat and tries to draw slow, even breaths to reorient himself. He draws out from his armpit slowly the precious issue of Tremendous, which he studies carefully, trying to steady his hands.
The thing is that the business with the Rhelm people is really beginning to get a bit out of control and the issue of threats—he had never been previously threatened—takes it to a new level. Perhaps he is in a bit deep. The thing to do at the moment, however, is to concentrate, hold onto himself, try to get back to normal. He knows that he will not give up the Cupboard article to them if he can help it, whether Earth is at stake or not. Anyway Cupboard's "A New Engineering of the Mind" is available in the May 1950 issue of Tremendous, copies of which are still easily available with Stuart. Fox is sure that if the aliens care that much for the transcripts, they will simply come down and take it or call Stuart to them or some such.
The girls wink at one another, giggle, slide on the seats to converse in finger code; they seem to be talking about him. It is no matter: if only they knew what manner of man was sitting across from them! What consequences, what causality, what enormous balance wheel revolves about him! It reduces to triviality anything that they could do to deprive him of their bodies.
He plunges into the Feb. '48 Tremendous, delighting as always in the fine Oliver cover, the diverting book review section by Nassler, the superb editorial by the venerable K. M. Conrad, editor of Tremendous for as far back as most readers can remember. It is an uneven issue but a pleasure to possess. Reminding himself not to miss the Eighty-sixth Street stop, Fox gives himself over to the magazine and, for the moment, absorbed as he is in this rare issue, the Rhelm people mean nothing to him. He hopes that this is not escapism. He has always believed, passionately, in facing reality.
Fox quit his job several months before in order to devote full time to the collection of science fiction. He had been an investigator in the Bureau of Resolution and Retreat, visiting dispossessed or evicted welfare recipients in hotels to which they had been relocated, trying to find out—for a massive study which the government had financed—how their social dislocation had affected their psychology.
"Do you feel that in leaving your home you have now left yourself?" he would ask people as individuals or groups. "And what were your precise emotions when you realized they were going to throw you out?"
They would look at him with a kind of dull muddled hatred until Fox, by finger signals or winks, would be able to convey to them that it didn't matter a damn: he was just putting in time like the rest of them; all he wanted was some colorful answers. The job paid $74.82 net a week after pension plan and medical deductions, and this was pretty good pay for a liberal arts graduate.
But somewhere along the way he had fallen into the accretion of science-fiction magazines, beginning to understand that there was something going on out there far more interesting than anything the bureau could offer him. And, at a certain point, he had simply handed in his form 31B, notice of resignation, and had quit. He had figured out that the unemployment compensation would cover his rent and food nicely and leave him almost twenty dollars a week for science-fiction magazines; it would do this for at least twenty-six and possibly fifty-two weeks, and that was as far as he cared to look into the future. Life, after all, was a blind lottery.
Then he figured that if he could expand his collection of Tremendous to completion he would probably be able to use it as collateral for a bank loan and then get into something really interesting, maybe a dealership of his own. The fact was that Fox had not figured things out too carefully. But then, on the basis of almost anything he had learned, there was really no reason to. There was another lousy war going on—thank God he had asthma and bad eyesight—and all through the field of science fiction things seemed to be breaking down. Thrilling and Thoughtful were offering competition to Tremendous and stealing all of Conrad's best writers, making insulting comments about Tremendous in their editorials. And then too many of the writers seemed to have fallen on bad days. Sometimes he had found himself thinking that he was not reading new science fiction but was instead reading three or four basic stories being rewritten endlessly: the field had fallen out of energy.
Also his social life had gone to pieces; not that he had ever gotten along particularly with girls in the first place. But he simply had never had any luck with them at all, and at twenty had given up the whole thing with a sigh. They just weren't worth the kind of self-destruction caring about it would have involved.
The people he had associated with in the bureau had all kind of drifted away after his resignation, even though his quitting had been regarded as a great act, the first blow for freedom among his acquaintances. At the farewell party they had given him in the bar across the street all of them had said that they wanted to keep in close touch with Fox: maybe he could lend them a little of his courage. He had never gotten around to quite explaining that it was not courage which had dictated his resignation but a simple failure of involvement. He did not care any more. The bureau no longer served his psychological needs. And he did not need the money.
Fortunately Stuart had taken an interest in him and that was an important contact even though Stuart was perhaps a little too money-oriented. There were a few people in the rooming house whom he could have talked to, but none of them, with one exception, cared about science fiction. That exception, Susan Forsythe, who lived across the hall from him, looked at it in an entirely different way: always wanting to involve him in social events and meetings and conventions and the like.
So, when you thought the whole thing over carefully, it was almost ominous. He was getting practically nowhere with his collection, having run up against a stubborn handful of rare issues which he could not for the life of him acquire; and the field did not seem to have the energy that it did when he fell into it a couple of years ago. Then, too, there was the confusing matter of the Rhelm people. That was why finally picking up the Feb. '48 had been a genuine breakthrough. But even that the bastard aliens wouldn't let him truly enjoy. Besides, they were after his files, wanted the Cupboard transcripts which he could not possibly turn over without breaking up his collection.
It was a lousy situation, there was no question about it. Sometimes Fox had the feeling that he was at a crossroads; that he would have to make a decision shortly on which way his life was going to go because twenty-three was no longer so young. On the other hand, he also occasionally had the feeling that he knew exactly what he was going to do, had found his life's purpose, and that if they would only get off his back—the Rhelm people and Susan Forsythe, that is—he could simply go ahead and put together painlessly the most complete file of science fiction in all of West Side Manhattan. It was hard to figure. The war didn't help. The Rhelm people didn't help. And sometimes, he had to admit, Stuart didn't help particularly either—what with his eternally putting a price on the nameless, a value on the imponderable.
Fox enters the rooming house, climbs the four flights, gasping, and staggers into his room. For a moment he is blinded by the dazzle: someone has put the shades up and in the glare he can barely see the familiar outlines of the bed, the chair, the table, and the stacks and stacks of carefully piled magazines placed in all corners of the apartment—as well as residing in a glorious heap at the very center.
For a frantic instant he believes that he has been robbed; that some fan or lunatic has gotten in by bribing the landlord and has cleaned him out. But then he hears a giggle on the bed and meanwhile his vision clears a trifle and he comes to understand that it is only Susan who has come into the room during his absence, opened the shades, and is now sitting on his bed with an early issue of Thoughtful.
Otherwise the room is as he last remembered it. Furniture is lined up against all of the walls in various states of disrepair—all of it several decades old. It was placed there by his landlord, Mr. Browning, several weeks ago for "safekeeping." Burglars had been into the heirlooms which he keeps secreted in the cellar and Browning had felt he would stand a better chance, all things being equal, by scattering his possessions into the rooms of the various tenants—none of whom objected to this manuever very strongly. , "You got to remember," the man had told him, "that I'm the landlord and that means that the property is mine and I can make any use of it I see fit. These are my rooms and you are merely my tenants. Like, if I own a slave and the slave owns a book, then I own the book, right?"
This logic had struck Izzinius as somewhat tortuous. But immersed as he had been at that time in the job of stacking up his Thoughtfuls into a neat unshelved row beside his bed, he had let the question go without argument. Now he has learned that some discomfited tenants have passed around memoranda concerning a tenants' meeting of protest to Browning's appropriation of their "private lives." It hardly seems to matters.
Susan takes off her glasses and says hello without any emotion at all, looking with curiosity at the Tremendous which Fox has removed from his armpit. She is a slender girl, about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, with a fairly good figure. Her eyes reflect a look of hard aggression, which the glasses strangely manage to soften, and a kind of wondering, blank confusion, which he has always found puzzling and somewhat attractive.
Fox gathers she is some kind of production assistant in a minor advertising agency, concentrating on paste-ups of variously illumined whiskey bottles and occasional modeling of footwear. But her hours at the agency are rather loose and she tends to be in the rooming house more often than she is not, explaining that she is basically a free-lancer. He suspects that she is really unemployed but has never seen her at the unemployment offices; this may only indicate that they have different reporting dates, of course. More importantly, she is a science-fiction fan—the only science-fiction fan that he has ever known other than Stuart, and that is a professional relationship. Since he found this out by purest coincidence months ago, when she dropped into his rooms to borrow a dollar and ended up kneeling over his collection for several hours, he has never gotten over thinking that life is, after all, a rather enclosed phenomenon. The delimitation of circumstances, for all the possibilities inherent, is strictly remarkable and is the kind of thing which might be worth an essay at some time. But they have no social or sexual relationship whatsoever—Fox cannot truly regard her as a girl, which is the only reason that he has been able to get along with her in the first place. Although Susan has been trying to persuade him for several months now to become involved in a fan organization of which she is corresponding secretary and has told him more than once that his collection-instinct without social outlet is a very dangerous thing which can only lead to loneliness, parsimony and insanity if he pushes it to its logical conclusion.
"What do you have there?" she says, blinking at the magazine. "Oh, I see, it's a Tremendous!" She gets up from the bed, takes it from him, and begins to look at it with close interest while Fox goes to the refrigerator, takes out a coke bottle and sips from it idly, trying, as he always seems to be doing with Susan, to regain control of the situation.
"Listen," he says. "I mean, we're good friends and all that, and we have the same interests, but do you have to just come into my room without letting me know or behind my back or something like that?" Trying to come on quickly and forcefully with her, he finds himself once again trailing off into obscurantism and gloom, and says pettishly, "I mean, this is very dangerous, just going into people's rooms like that: you could be hurt or something."
"Oh, crap, Izzie," she says. "You know that Browning's crazy; he won't give anybody a key or let us lock our rooms because he believes it would be an insult and we're all just a good big family here. This is a lousy cover. Who is this guy? J. C. Oliver? All of his people look like bears and his aliens look just like people. And the color is lousy."
"It's a rare issue," Fox says. "I paid three dollars to Stuart for it so handle it carefully."
"Oh come on, Izzie, really! It's not a rare issue at all; Teddy. Wilkes has five of these in his files, I happen to know. And as for Stuart, you've really got to get away from that man; I'd think that you would have seen into him by now. He probably picked that up from Teddy for ten cents and pushed it on you for thirty times the cost. He's probably trying to corner the whole market so that he can slip them all into you like rare issues. I've warned you about him, Izzie, he isn't to be trusted. I see that they have a Zeiler novelette here; that was probably the sequel to The Tones of Timuriad. I don't like it. That was a lousy year anyway.
"What you've got to do, Izzie" she says, tossing the magazine on the bed with a pretty gesture of contempt, making it appear somewhat ridiculous and Fox's own joy in its possession seem merely the craven ravings of a lunatic. She has always been able to do things like this to him. "What you've got to do is to get yourself away from all of this stuff, begin to associate with people who really know
science fiction and then you'd begin to understand that Stuart Wiseman isn't your friend at all. He doesn't even know science fiction. The truth is that Stuart Wiseman couldn't tell a Tremendous from a Smashing Satellite Stories with the covers off. He's just a little cheap businessman who makes money off ignorant people like you. If you'd come out with me to the Solarians—"
"Stuart invited me," Fox interrupts. "He said that there's a meeting coming up and he invited me."
"Oh, he just did that to impress you and because he knows you'd never come. The fact is that Stuart Wiseman couldn't show his face in the Solarians; since that time in 1949, when he said what he did about David Martinson, there's no one there who would touch him. Izzy, you've got to learn to get around and face things like this. It's a whole big world out there; it isn't only just putting together a file of Thoughtful Stories."
"I don't collect Thoughtfuls. I collect Tremendous and Thrilling."
"Tremendous, Thrilling, it's all the same thing, Izzie. What's the whole point of it unless you relate to people who have the same interests that you do? Well, I can see that this is getting nowhere; you never listen to me."
Only part of this is true, Fox knows. But almost every discussion he has had recently with Susan has gone in this direction. For reasons which he cannot understand, she seems to have an almost missionary impulse to convert him to "fandom" and which she says is the key to a happier existence—not only for Fox but for any serious reader of science fiction since "fandom" operates to get a person out of his "shell."
It is possible that if she was a little less positive, a little less determined, a wee bit more tolerant of his nature, he might have told her all about the Rhelm people some days ago. Because the fact is that he needs very badly to have someone to talk to. He is not sure what is happening to him but has had the intimation that his sanity is crumpling, and it would be a good thing to at least share his apprehensions if not the madness itself with another person of similar interests. On the other hand, Fox is sophisticated enough to concede that if his relationship with Susan was deep enough to embrace any concept of confidence she might terrify him so much that there would have been no relationship at all. The thing is that he simply cannot regard her in that fashion. It is for that reason, as much as any other, that Fox finally lets himself go after weeks of resentment and says: "Listen, Susan, I've really had enough of this. You don't like my collection. You don't like my magazine. You don't even like me that much; everything which I do is somehow wrong for you. All you want to do is to push me onto your friends. If I'm so bad why don't you just stay with your friends and leave me out of it?"
This speech, given with the intent of being a smashing and final retort to everything which she has done to him somehow seems to go right past her. She merely sighs and rumples the sheets on the bed and says:
"Oh, Izzie, you take everything so personally. No wonder Stuart Wiseman can rob you blind."
And he is left absolutely speechless, suspended somewhere between rage and grief. There will never be an end to it until Susan moves out of the rooming house, which, she has indicated, she will not be doing for a long time since she finds the rent cheap and Browning "a real crazy and interesting character."
"I'm a collector, Susan," he says irrelevantly, trying not to whine, which is almost always his tendency under pressure. "I'm just interested in the magazines and the writers. I don't really feel like making a social thing of it."
"Yes," she says. "Yes, Izzie, but you're all, all wrong, you see." But she seems to have lost interest in the topic and her attention, as usual, when she no longer wants to deal with a subject, seems to have drifted somewhere below and slightly to the left of him; her eyes fixated on some crack near the ceiling into which Browning, some months ago, inserted the corpses of two roaches, apparently not only for safekeeping but for aesthetic reasons.
"How many Tremendouses do you have now, Izzie?" she asks. She is obviously less interested in his answer than in creating some kind of a mood. Still it is the kind of cue which Fox finds irresistible.
"It isn't how many you have, Susan," he says. "I mean, anybody can have a lot of issues. The point is how far back the collection is complete."
"If you're that kind of collector."
"Well, is there any other kind of collector to be? Now the thmg is that you want to have an unbroken line of a magazine going back of course to vol. 1, no. 1. But it's also important that you keep your gaps filled in. That is you wouldn't want to have a lot from 1949, say, and a lot from 1942 and nothing in between. That way you'd have a seven year gap whereas if you scattered the same twenty-four issues, through the years you could have three issues from every year and then fill in around them. Lots of people make mistakes like that: they think that they should pick up a complete '48 or a total '46 and then they lose everything in between because the issues they passed up while they were going for separate years can get kind of lost in the shuffle and turn out to be rare and then where are you when you trv to fill in, when you want to back up toward completion, well, Susan, you're in the soup. That's all there is to it, straight in the soup. But I want not only completion but a good scatter, if you follow what I'm saying, and I try to scout out the rare issues. Now, in my case—"
"All right, Izzie," she says, "all right, calm down."
Fox realizes that he has been pacing and gesticulating rather wildly and sits down on the bed next to her. She absently strokes his palm and seems to slide her hips against his: a peculiar movement.
"In my case," he goes on, "I've tried to have it both ways: good scatter and then bulking around certain months. But now I'm complete back to June'1947 and, skipping the May 1947, I'm complete again back to December of '45 and then I only gap until July. I've got them in every year. I have— I figured this out now—I have an 85% complete recollection with a modal variation of missed months of only two and then—"
"Well," she says, "that must be very exciting, Izzie, but you're sweating," and puts a hand on his forehead.
He can feel the cool, flat dampness of her palm working agr'nst his skin, the hint of circles around the hairline. She moves in to look at him closely and he sees the open bland-ness of her eyes, small curves of her neck. It is suddenly a peculiar moment, unlike any he has previously known with Susan, and he feels frightened. There is a strangeness to it, but then something seems to slip into gear.
He puts a hand on her waist and with a small groan she slides against him, her mouth parting toward him, and he comes down on her. There is a feeling of clanging in his limbs and a strange sensation, which can only be described as curiosity, and he is immersed—immersed as he really never has been in this way in his life. Something seems about to happen and something is happening and just when Fox feels himself on the verge of something enormous—either catastrophic or beneficent, he does not know which—at that very moment the Rhelm people—the dirty sons of bitches, the lousy stinking miserable bastards—the Rhelm people snatch him up again and there is a feeling of dislocation. Wow, is there a feeling of dislocation! And she goes away and everything goes away and he is back in the goddamned ship again with the aliens bobbing and leering over him and here we go again all right and Fox is not sure, at this juncture, that he can stand any of it. Invasion is one thing but meddling with a man's private life should certainly be called another.
in the endless universal night.
"Well, then, Fox," the Arch-Leader says, bending over him with something which seems vaguely like compassion twinkling in his deep-set eyes. "Well here we are again. Have you thought things over? May we have your decision?"
Fox struggles against the bindings, feeling himself fill with rage. It is really the first time he has gotten mad at the Rhelm people.
"Listen," he says, "are you aware of what I was doing?"
"Of course we were aware," the Leader says sadly. "We're aware of everything; we just can't intervene much. The thing is that we have to take you back when it's necessary, not when it's convenient. Besides, I don't really think much of that fellow human of yours; she has a very shallow consciousness."
"No she doesn't and in any event it's none of your business! Do I give opinions on your crew?"
"Why should you?" says the Arch-Leader. "It wouldn't make a bit of difference to any of us. We all have full certification. I'm afraid that our standards of j'udgment would not apply to you or, of course, vice-versa. Nevertheless, that is a very silly girl you've got there, Fox. She's dangerous because she's so stupid. And, furthermore, she doesn't appreciate you."
"I don't give a goddamn what you think." Fox roars, trying hopelessly to twist free of the bindings. "And in the bargain she's not my girl, and in the last place I really can't take any more of this. Now if you want to conquer the universe that's your business and good luck to you, but 111 be damned if you can interfere with my private life!"
"Oh nonsense," the Arch-Leader says with an almost benevolent calm. "Nonsense. You realize that there's no lag at all: our discussions take place in neotime, in a couple of milliseconds between respirations. And when you go back you won't have missed a beat. Your silly social affairs have never been meddled with. And in the second place you're the one causing all the trouble for yourself; we're just trying to be utterly reasonable. Have you made your decision?"
The insufferable arrogance of the Arch-Leader is the final straw. Fox says, "Yes, I have made my decision. I won't turn over the article to you. Why should I? If you're so omnipotent you can just go down and get it, then you won't have to wheedle it out of me."
The Arch-Leader sighs a massive sigh which seems to inflate his being into different proportions.
"All of you get out of here," he says to the other aliens. Scurrying, they hasten to obey. They leave the room very quickly and there is the sound of bolts and tumblers clicking into place. The Leader floats away for a moment, comes back, sighs again and kneels down to a point where he regards Fox's knees.
"Oh, come on," he says, "be reasonable. I thought we'd have one last private discussion and maybe try to bring you to your senses, Fox. The trouble with most of this crew is that they have no sensitivity, no patience, no awareness of the intricacies of diplomacy; they are a bit more eager to take direct action than perhaps I might be. After all, they're only putting their time in, they want to complete the mission and get home. A man like me, with certain social and technological advantages, can take a somewhat longer view. But I tell you the truth: I don't know how much longer we can keep up our mild little discussions and expect me to retain control. There are certain strong, dissident groups here who are in favor of torture or worse. So 111 try to be reasonable this one more time, Izzinius, and then things will really have to get moving along. Why are you so stubborn?"
Not thinking for the moment, Fox answers with the simple truth of it. "You see, the thing is that I think I'm insane," he says. "I feel that I'm probably dreaming the whole thing anyway or that I've gone into one of those schizoid breaks with reality. So nothing that I do can possibly matter and I might as well retain my self-respect."
"That's common," the Leader says, "I mean, it would be expectable in the normal population; but you're a supernormal, Izzinius: an exceptional mart, an intellectual, a collector and a science-fiction reader. You are someone whose involvement in this field of special extrapolation should, by any reasonable expectation, prepare you to be open-minded, to accept, without question, things that the rigid, narrow, limited hierarchical types up there couldn't. I just can't understand why we're having so much trouble with you. Surely you've read enough stories of alien invasion and so on to be able to accept this kind of thing as a real possibility."
"But you see," Fox says, "you see, that's the thing. I've gotten really hooked on science fiction in the last year or so, I admit that. But maybe I couldn't put up with the strain, all of this stuff taking over my mind and so on, really getting involved with it. So I've had a breakdown and from time to time I hallucinate. Of course I don't want to be insane, it's just the way that it looks to me. Probably it's nervous fatigue, but I can't afford to get the kind of rest I'd need."
It is really surprising, now that he and the Arch-Leader have finally gotten to talking things over quietly alone, how reasonable, calm and sensible a discussion they can have. The creature is not really unreasonable. As a matter of fact it has a point—at least as much of a point as Fox does. Of course this cannot change the outcome, but for a moment he has a feeling of regret: it would be nice if it could. It would be nice if he could work the situation out on a rational basis, accept it for the insanity it is, but still follow it through to a reasonable point. Of course this is impossible under the circumstances; but it is the kind of thing, at least once during a situation, that you might want to think about.
"Now you see," the Arch-Leader says, "the point is this: we very badly need Cupboard's 'Engineering and the Science of the Mind.' Those transcripts are far more crucial than you might possibly imagine to our plans and goals and until we have them we cannot proceed. But we can't get them ourselves as you suggest, it just isn't that easy."
"Well, why not?"
"Because," the Arch-Leader says with infinite patience, "those transcripts are in the May 1950 issue of Tremendous Science Fiction and that happens to be a rare issue. There are very, very few copies around: just a few with specialized dealers who hardly want to sell anyway and would be loathe to let go of it for almost any price. The articles created quite a storm, we're aware of that. Now, we just can't appear in a bookstore or at one of your conventions and try to pick up an issue of that magazine. It would create a sensation."
"Why?"
"Can you imagine us, one of us that is, coming in and trying to buy a May 1950 Tremendous and being treated like ordinary customers. No, Fox, it wouldn't work: it would create a sensation and we'd never get it anyway. What we have to do is to approach someone—someone like you—who happens to already have a copy of that issue on hand and with whom we can negotiate. Besides, where did you get the idea we're omnipotent? The fact is that we're very limited in what we can do and we function in terms of a very structured situation. We're just the civil service. That's ultimately why you have nothing to fear from us. We couldn't possibly 'take over' your foul little planet; all that we could do would be to kind of, um, guide and instruct it a bit while leaving it as always in the hands of leaders, who, I might say, seem to have far more of their interest at heart than yours. Leaders, who, I might add, further seem to represent far more of a danger to you than anyone of us. You might want to think about that some to add to your other series of considerations: who really cares about Izzinius Fox?"
"I've never been a political person. I mean, I just never was interested in that kind of thing. It isn't that bad as far as I can see. We have a lot of problems, but things seem to be getting better. And, anyway, what the hell does it have to do with me?"
"Well," the Arch-Leader says a bit grimly, "you just wait, Fox; you just wait. We've had experience after experience with systems like yours, and I tell you that the trends are nothing that would make you particularly happy. The whole thing is beginning to go under with such shocking speed and force that twenty years from now, if you people are not diverted from the course you are following, twenty of your years from now the nature of the lives led by most of you will be simply insupportable. And all through the right, left, and center the society will be absolutely riven, literally toppling about you: tremendous repression, anarchy, dislocation, drift.
"Well, why talk about it, Fox. It's fust depressing and anyway it has nothing to do with the situation at hand. I can't persuade you that way. The trouble with you creatures is that you like the nature of your lives; you think that the system is somehow inherent to your nature and then you tie it up with religious determinism and destiny and so on and there you are. This kind of culture lag is shocking, simply shocking. Why you people are postftechnological, Fox, and you don't even realize that yet; you're still trying to work with an armory of emotions and social devices which were outmoded over a century ago. But I'm tending to wander, I took a few sociology credits in the training school and perhaps tend to think about it more than is really necessary in my job.
"We want those transcripts, Fox, and we want them now."
It is one of the most interesting discussions Fox has ever had with anyone. One of the lacks in his life has always been vigorous intellectual discourse to the level of his potential. The Arch-Leader, no matter how much a figment of his imagination on the one hand or how malevolent on the other, is a fascinating conversationalist—there is no doubt about that at all.
"What's so important about 'Engineering and Science of the Mind?"
The alien's eyes seem to gleam and he gives a short, hysterical bark, then settles back, curling around Fox's knees and says, "He discovered the secret, Fox. The veritable secret of relations among creatures on your planet, the behavior-istic tendencies, the nature of the repressions and blocks which so saddle you under. With those materials to work from we can instantly deduce the best way in which we can grant you the mass therapy you will need to join our union; without them we have to struggle in the dark! Profound wisdom, Fox! Profound, inert mysticism interlarded with the holiest of truths! In any culture, at some stage like this, there comes along a man to yield you the best, truest, most concise and deadliest picture of yourselves and that is what Cupboard did in his 'Engineering and Science of the Mind.'
"Of course it's a pity he had to do it in one of your pulp magazines as opposed to what you would call the, uh, the slicks. But the nature of genius and the final insight is that it is almost inevitably going to be cast aside in its own time. It only finds its truest identity, causation, meaning, and relevance later; and the important thing is that he was able to publish it. Now, we must have those articles, Fox, in order to proceed."
"I see," Fox says. "I never thought that Cupboard was much of anything really except a science-fiction writer. I never liked his stuff particularly. If you want to know the truth, I never even read the article. I never read the articles in Tremendous. They're really sort of dull, if you want to know the truth, and I don't like the editorials too much either. I used to like them, but now I don't understand most of them. And I don't even like the letter section too much; something seemed to happen to it late last year—the letter section, I mean—and now it has nothing to do with the stories. And when you come right down to it, I don't even read the stories too much anymore."
"Well," the alien says crisply, "that's fust one of those things, Izzinius. Perhaps the trouble is that you're growing up and your energies can no longer be contained by this particular obsession. At least that's what one of our psychologists might say about you if you were one of our people; my understanding of the psychology of the people of your planet is hardly so excellent. I really would enjoy going on and on, talking these things over with you, but I'm afraid that the gap is spreading and we really must wind things up now. I've tried to be reasonable, you know, and really hear you out and explain our point of view as well. Will you give us those transcripts?"
The alien leans forward, his strange eyes seeming to narrow. At that moment Fox realizes that it has all been a pose and that the creature, no less than at any other time, has simply been out to get him, to manipulate him against his will into a kind of betrayal. Whatever else can be said about Izzinius Fox, this one thing is sure: he is not of the stuff that would betray mankind. Not ever. Mankind is all he has. It is, so to speak, his Home Race—he has begun to think this way only since the coming of the Rhelm people, but it is still a very stimulating way to feel—and there is nothing he would ever do to turn his back on the genus that has given him life.
All these thoughts and more go through his mind in the instant. He is aware that the alien is regarding him coldly, but at this moment the alien itself does not exist. All that there is is conscience, choice and memory. Seizing on to the three together, Fox knows what the answer will be. "No," he says.
The creature's face seems to congeal. The doors are instantly torn open as a flood of aliens come through, all of them with expressions as disconcerted as the Arch-Leader's. "All right, Fox," the creature says quietly. "Well and done. Our time now is unfortunately up and we will have to resume our discussions on a different level when we begin again. I thought that it was possible to reason with you. I thought that an approach which dealt with sense and justice would be satisfactory. But naivete, as you see, is not a trait restricted only to members of your race. Next time, Fox, there will be no discussions. There will be no dialogue. There will be no persuasion. You do not really expect us to try to be reasonable forever. Not in the presence of a representative of a race so stubborn, so vindictive, so deeply rooted in its projective neuroses that it is unable to deal with simple universal truths.
"Well get you Fox!" the alien screams. "Well fix you for what you've done to us. You're not dealing with a pack of your extrapolatory monsters here you understand; we happen to be official representatives of the galactic union."
The Arch-Leader bends down once again, rubs his face against Fox's foot. And for the first time Fox senses respiration, ingestion; comes to understand that the aliens, like most sentient beings, probably have bodily processes and that those processes in the case of the Arch-Leader have been momentarily impeded.
"Next time the whips!" the alien screams, while the figures behind him seem to mumble in dispassionate agreement. "Next time the irons, the spikes, the nails, the thumbtacks. The small, excruciating marks left upon the flesh. The kicks, the humiliations, the barbarism, the degradation, the realization of every one of your silly archetypal nightmares! That's it, Fox!" the alien bellows.
The scene, thankfully, begins to dissolve. There is once again the feeling of implosion coming upon Fox and he submits to it gracefully this time, trying to speed his removal.
"The irons, Fox!" he hears in the background and opens his mouth to scream defiance. Something sufficiently terran and heroic like: "You mean nothing to me, I'm just dreaming!" or "I'll never betray the green hills of Earth!" or "Mankind is clean and vigorous and growing and we will never settle for your corruption!" Something that would put the wraps on the interview, so to speak, and show these filthy aliens where he, Izzinius Fox, will always and truly reside.
But it is too late and thank God for all of that because the fact is that he is terrified and he is back on Earth, in his furnished room on the West Side, in Susan's arms. No dissolution here as he stiffens against her, in the interval of no-time, giving one small, barking screech to punctuate his adventure as she gasps in response and tries to fold her large breasts around his helpless head.
Susan has taken his fear for passion—which may be an old problem with her anyway for all he knows—and her response is both acute and surprising. What she is trying to do, with enormous concentration and intensity, is to work Fox into some kind of implementation of his sounds, trying to bring forth from him some concerete testimony of necessity. And there is no way for the moment, of course, that he can explain to her that she has got him wrong. It also would be an unseemly thing to do since Susan, except for Stuart, is his one contact with humanity and certainly his only contact at this difficult moment. So Fox, trying desperately to thrust himself into a mood and purpose he has never known, does what he can, fumbles with her, tries to lay her bare, encourages himself with twitches and moans to rise beneath her.
She mumbles into his ear, "It's all right, Izzie. I'm here; I'm here," as if she could be anywhere else.
For the moment his terror of breaking away from Susan outweighs the terror of staying with her. So the fact is that for the first time in his life Fox finds himself truly on the verge of Getting It. Its qualities, its implications hover within his very grasp and it is nothing like he imagined it would be. He is not in the least terrified; it is only a matter of flesh against flesh or perhaps one could call it a question of matching bruises, breath, sobs sigh for sigh in this close, unwieldy space.
But his preoccupation is too enormous. He is thinking of the Rhelm people (perhaps this is the reason why he is not terrified: he has other and more important things on his mind). Shortly his movements start to become mechanical; he becomes aware that he is forcing himself rather than moving spontaneously. There is a feeling of slow, vanishing retreat from all the edges and then he has backed away from her.
She is holding him at arm's length and looking at him with some intenseness while she says, "Izzie, you've got to be more patient. You're forcing yourself."
This is the final straw. He cannot control himself any longer. The irony of all ironies is that after twenty-three years of deprivation he has found himself in the act of Getting It precisely at that moment of time when nothing could interest him less. Small chuckles and gasps move gracelessly inside him.
Susan looks at him out of a kind of deep bright pain and says, "Why are you laughing?"
He comes to understand in the instant—he is a man of unusual sensitivity no matter what the Rhelm people or Stuart Wiseman think of him—that she feels that he is laughing at her. A moment of absent tenderness flicks through him, thrusting him to a moment of emotional perception, perhaps as "mature" as any he has ever known, because in that instant he sees her pain and he comes to understand that in a difficult, more qualified way, it is more profound than that bleak pain of his own which he has carried around for so many years.
How could they do this to him? How could this be the joker at the end of all those years of loss?… that women felt as profoundly as men and suffered as much. He understands that he is in a position to hurt her very deeply and the thing is that he does not want to. He does not know what he owes to her, probably nothing, certainly very little, but he certainly has no right to bring this look into her eyes; and in any event he is too shaken, too shaken. Too much has happened to him now, even if the Arch-Leader is correct in saying that his particular interrelations occur in no-time. He cannot control himself anymore. He feels it all coming out. What he does is to tell her all about the Rhelm people.
He does so by leaning back on the bed and beginning to talk, after a while when she is listening intently (at first she had thought he was crazy but in a few moments he was able to wipe that suspicion along with all remnants of pain from her face; Susan, he comes to understand, could more easily apprehend, understand and accommodate herself to the destruction of all human life on the planet than she could a sexual rejection), he leans forward to gesticulate, when he has her totally involved, at every conceivable level, he leans back again and finishes it off.
It takes about thirty minutes, maybe a little more or less, he is not keeping time. He tells her about the First Interception which occurred while he was lying on his cot equably reading the January '49 Tremendous: Parking Ticket, a novelette by Damon Tyson, has been the Tek Room winner for that month and he had looked forward for a long time to catching up with it (but it turned out to be pretty lousy) and the Second, longer Interception which occurred while he was rushing for the uptown bus on Fourth Avenue and which had seized him midway between stumbling over a fat old lady and coming into the enormous hilarity of a patrolman's hug, the Third Interception which fortunately had occurred to him in his very own rooms, this very place, a few days later and then the famous Fourth Interception itself at which time the Arch-Leader had finally gotten to the point and made the request for the Cupboard Transcripts.
Susan listens to the entire story with strange intentness, fitting a cigarette repeatedly into her golden holder without ever quite lighting it. She sighs to herself; mutters and mumbles; once reaches out and strokes his forehead when he describes a particularly chilling gesture of the Arch-Leader. Finally she kindles into horror and outright concern when he explains what has just happened to him at the very moment he was in Susan's arms on the very lip of finally having an experience he had never had before and which, thanks to the cruel and stubborn Arch-Leader, had been permanently wrecked for him.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that" she hums.
But Fox is not quite finished yet. There are implications to be discussed, and his theory of Alien Behavior.
"I think it's all a blind," he says. "I mean, I don't think they want the Cupboard transcripts at all. That's all crap and nonsense. After all, who could take Cupboard seriously? No, if you want my theory, they want one artifact, one physical thing from Earth which they can keep; they can't
keep anything, you see, unless it is willingly given over to them by a human being. That's my theory. And once they have these transcripts then they'll have power over us. So they cooked up this whole story about needing the article because they thought that I, as a science-fiction collector, would be gullible and willing to believe it; but they could have asked for anything. I mean, that is my theory, anyway, Susan, and that's about the whole thing now.
"I've been living under a great deal of strain as you know, but I'm glad I finally was able to talk it out with someone like you who might understand. But if you think I'm crazy, well, then I'm crazy and that's all there is to it. You don't think I'm crazy, do you, Susan?"
She ponders the point for a moment before answering, curling her lips together, and finally lighting the cigarette; watching the smoke drift up to the odorous corners and surfaces of the room while she makes him wait. He realizes that she is enjoying this, but on the other hand perhaps she is entitled; he has, after all, given her a rather rough time and she has been very courteous about listening to the whole thing. At last she says:
"No, Izzie, I don't think you're crazy. I mean, I don't know quite what there is to think. It's a highly unusual thing, of course, and the average person might think that you were crazy, but who am I to think so? Besides, my judgment doesn't mean anything. I do think that you've been reading too much science fiction, though."
There is a bland calmness to her voice; a kind of careful, gentle, overreaching sentiment which utterly masters him and her own implications. He comes to understand that Susan is so grateful to have had any kind of explanation, no matter how peculiar, for his withdrawal that she feels that the situation, in any event, has returned to her.
"It has nothing to do with science fiction!" he says rather loudly. "You read a lot of science fiction! All your friends in the social club read a lot of science fiction!"
"Solarians," she says.
"Solarians! What do I care? The city is filled with people who read a lot of science fiction and never had this happen to them! Joseph Steele reads a lot of science fiction! K. M. Conrad, the editor of Tremendous, says that he reads four hundred science-fiction stories a week for his magazine! And they aren't even all good! What does it have to do with reading science fiction?"
"All right, Izzie," she says, "don't overreact." And Fox realizes that he has indeed done this. He is reaching, as a matter of fact, in exactly the same fashion that he had some months ago when his mother for the first and only time visited his furnished rooms (unannounced, of course) and had seen the piles and piles of science-fiction magazines. She had started by berating him and then had switched to a certain soothing tone of voice, a certain understatement of manner which infuriated Fox because he came to think that she thought him insane. The whole thing had ended very unpleasantly. They had had no contact since.
"I'm not overreacting," he says sullenly. "I mean, it's a pretty horrible thing to live through, don't you think? They aren't doing this to you or to your friend Teddy Wilkes. They're doing it to me and it's all I can do to stand it anymore. How would you like to know that at any moment a goddamned group of ugly aliens could seize your mind and put you in a goddamned spaceship and start to make threats and torture you about the fate of Earth? They say they're going to torture me next time, Susan! They say they won't negotiate anymore! It could be the whole fate of Earth! Do you think that that's a pleasant thing for me to go through? And you talk about oyerreaction!"
"Teddy Wilkes isn't my friend," Susan says, putting out the cigarette carefully after having not really smoked it at all. "He's just one of the people down there. I mean, I've gone with him a couple of times, and he took me to see South Pacific last month, but it wasn't what you would call a date. Certainly there was nothing between us. I don't think that Teddy Wilkes is too interested in girls anyway, to tell the truth. I think that he's interested in science fiction and Teddy Wilkes too much to ever get involved. You know, I thought the same thing about you, Izzie, for a while."
"All right," Fox says. "That's not the point."
"Well, what is the point?" Susan says. "I certainly don't think that it's fair of you to start blaming me for your problems. I didn't get you into this, you know. I mean, you don't think that / had anything to do with it, did you?"
"No," Fox says. Susan's unreasonableness stirs him. The fact is, he feels that for the very first time he is beginning to understand women. Unfortunately he is not sure that he wasn't better off looking at things in the previous way. It is something very difficult to figure out. He begins to understand that here, no less than as with the Rhelm people, he has been vaulted into another world of shuddering possibility, strange implication, multiplicity of motive far beyond his mild means to cope with it. It is really too much for him and he sinks back on the bed sighing, gasping, rubbing his eyes, truly overwhelmed by desperation and yet at the same time leaving just enough of a cautious crack in one exposed eyelid to be able to judge Susan's reaction to his seizure. There is no reason, after all, why he should have to go through this alone.
"Well, all right," she says after a time, leaning down to look at him. "All right, Izzie. I can see where it's been a terrible strain. I mean, I don't know whether it's really happening or not, but in any case it's something pretty terrible to live through, I suppose. The thing is that you shouldn't make remarks about people like Teddy Wilkes, who you don't even understand, without being sure that you really understand them if you follow what I mean."
Fox sighs, sinks back even further into the bed, tries to, block out the whole thing. Possibly he could go to sleep and when he awakens it would be behind him: if not the Rhelm people (they seemed very determined and competent), then at least Susan—which would be something of a blessing.
"Anyway, I'll tell you what I think," she says. "If you want my best idea on the whole thing. You should come with me to the Solarians tonight and tell them the whole thing. Maybe they could help."
"I don't want to go to the Solarians," Fox mutters. "I'm a collector. There's nothing they can do to help me."
"How can you say that? They're all science-fiction people just like you and me and if they couldn't understand what's happening to you, who could? These aren't fools, you know, these are some of the brightest people in the city. If they can't give you a fair hearing and some ideas about what you might be able to do, then, Izzie, you're not really facing up to it. Maybe you're making the whole thing up and you just don't want other people to start tearing it apart."
This has been a cunning shot and Fox's awareness of the ploy does not, unfortunately, lessen his reaction. He sits bolt upright on the bed, eyes staring, hands curling and says, "It is not something I made up. How could I make up something like this? These people—I mean, these creatures— these aliens have seized my mind! They're out to destroy the whole planet! Why would I make something like that up? The whole fate of the universe could be at stake!"
"Oh, I didn't mean for you to get all upset. I mean, I didn't think that you were lying or hallucinating or anything. I just thought that if this thing were truly serious to you, and that you had the courage of your convictions, you would want to come down to the Solarians and talk to them about it. Isn't it at least that important? These aliens were important enough to you to take over your whole mind and to make you tell me all about it. So why don't you at least try to talk the whole thing over with a group of people who might be able to help you? I think they'd really like to learn about this, Izzinius." Her eyes now seem to be emitting a faint gleam, but whether it is for the sake of the Solarians or only for a more intricate purpose, Fox does not know. "I mean, they could give you some really good ideas," she says.
"Listen, Susan," Fox says. "Do you really think that a group of science-fiction fans could save this planet? Could understand this situation and save it?"
"I most certainly do," she says. "Who else?"
Fox feels suddenly a wonderful kind of submissiveness, an absolute sense of relaxation spreading through him. It could be called apathy-on-the-cheap. He has never felt anything like this wonderful, soaring sense of disconnection which suddenly seems to place miles between himself and his motives; light years, between himself and causation, thrust him into a small shell of space where nothing at all matters. Too, it is time that he got out and socialized. He is undoubtedly leading a very narrow, enclosed life as Susan herself has pointed out; and part of the very problem might be ascribed to his isolation. If he had traveled in a crowd, if he had had a lot of friends, surely the Rhelm people would not have been so quick to disrupt his life, so contemptuous of his private affairs.
"All right," he says, "all right, then, I'll go."
"And you'll tell them everything?" she says.
"I'll tell them everything," Fox says, "if they want to listen."
"Oh, they'll listen," she says. "That's one thing you can say about the Solarians, they'll listen to anything."
Overcome by his wonderful lassitude, bidding goodbye for no good reason to the shiftless, trapped Izzinius Fox of only a few hours in the past, Fox permits Susan to draw him against her. Then, for the longest time, he immerses himself in a certain kind of exploration, fear and palpitation tucked away neatly in one corner of his mind—that corner undoubtedly the one populated by the Rhelm people who, he hopes, will lay off long enough to get him educated.
They do and he is grateful but when everything is finished he is not able to quite convince himself that what has happened is more important than the fate of Terra although, he admits, one of the interesting aspects of it is that it makes it seem more important at the time. He puts it down to biology, one of the hard sciences he has never cared for, and drifts into a thick, dreamless sleep against Susan for an hour or two until Browning comes bumping up the stairs with another cabinet to be placed in the room, giving vacant disgusted glares at the magazines which, he has told Fox before, ought to be charged for double as extra tenants.
Fox had not discovered science fiction so much as having fallen into it. He had bought and read a few books during his teens but had found the plots fairly dull and the writing for the most part at a level somewhat below what the city university's Department of English had told him to consider worthwhile. By the time he was sixteen he was entirely beyond it and never thought of it much again until one day, working on field time in the Department of Relief and Restoration, he found himself in the vicinity of that large clutter of used book and magazine shops which agglomerated near the Astor Place station of the Lexington Avenue IRT.
He didn't want to make the visit which was his assignment in that area (he was due to interview a dependent relative of a recipient to see whether or not the recipient would be able, out of his own grant, to lend the relative support, otherwise he would have to Expand the Case, one of the most depressing maneuvers available to someone in his position since it necessitated the filling out of thirty-seven separate forms in triplicate and with special addenda to the intermediary consultation section of the Central Office). And he didn't want the blank defiance of simply chucking it all and going home where undoubtedly his mother (at that time he still lived with his mother) would pump him almost hysterically for confidential information from the case records.
It was one of her chief pleasures now that most of his father's inheritances had run out along with his season's pass to all roller derby games in perpetuo. (His father, three months before his lamentable death, had been voted Roller
Derby Fan of the Year and was presented at a magnificent ceremony with lifetime admission to all competition plus a pair of miniature skates and knives to commemorate his interest: unfortunately the Roller Derby had run into economic trouble in the large city and was now operating out of places like Bismarck, North Dakota, and Macon, Georgia—places where his mother in her poor health was unable to travel with the ease that she could get to Madison Square Garden.)
"My God," his mother would say. "You mean to say that that bitch has had three out-of-wedlock children and doesn't know how it happened to her? You mean to say that that man has been in Lexington, Kentucky, for three whole years and thinks that he only gets the shakes? You mean to say that people like this are riding the subways all the time, possibly sitting next to me or kneeing me right in the aisle? Thieves! Assassins! Murderers! What are we coming to if respectable people can be riding with things like this and never even know it! Tell me who else you know that has out-of-wedlock children. What's the all-time record? Who do you hear of that had the most out-of-wedlock children? Do they all think that it's spontaneous generation? Amazing! Terrible! What's the city coming to? Why don't you go out and get yourself a decent job?"
The whole thing was very depressing and somehow grim and terrible because more and more Fox found that he was comparing his mother unfavorably to the people the department serviced. She had the same drives and motives but far less energy and invention. But at that time he had not yet quite made the decision to leave home because his room was comfortable, food was always on the table, and the old lady charged him only forty dollars a week for all services which gave him fifteen dollars free and clear spending money which he did not know how to disburse.
He went into one of the bookstores, an odorous cave containing a few weeping old men, who were attempting to rip pages from medical textbooks and stuff them into their pockets, along with two exhausted clerks who were themselves totally absorbed in the Occult and Horoscope section and thus could not have cared less (no one quite knew who the owner was although it was suspected that he visited the store daily in the guise of one of the old men), and going eventually into the back room where he discovered Stuart Wiseman and Stuart Wiseman's Science-Fiction Book Service. From that moment he had, in a sense, discovered himself. He was not interested in the books. He was interested in the magazines.
Stuart had piles and piles of magazines. He had the three major ones: Thrilling, Tremendous, and Thoughtful. And all of the minor ones as well: Terrific, Super Duper, Explosion, Marvelous Mystery Tales and Astonishment from the Frozen North. Most of them were in mint condition; and Izzinius began to tremble as he reached his hands toward the stacks of magazines, ran his fingers through them, admired the colorful covers. It was as if he was holding the past in his hands. Not only his own past—which was certainly dull enough—but some kind of communal mystery which the magazines tapped into, a mystery which he could barely apprehend except in terms of the strange dates on the cover: April 1945, May 1946, March 1943. The covers themselves glinted with power, the contents pages with implication. And Fox had been overwhelmed with a sensation utterly foreign to his own nature and, apart from everything he had ever known, what he wanted to do was to possess those magazines; not only for their own sake but because in so doing he could possess the past itself. It was all too insubstantial, it all got away from you too quickly. February 1945 was a glimmer; May of 1946 an empty token. (What had he been doing in May of 1946? Oh yes, he had been a sophomore at the city university, trying to get into a house plan.) But with the help of the magazines it all came back to him. In a sense, then, he was being given a Second Chance by virtue of the magazines to go over his own past and do it right.
Of course all of these ideas and emotions did not go through him at the exact time of entrance into Stuart's store: that had only happened much later when he had been able to sort out, so to speak, the quality of his responses, the question of his destiny; a Sorting Out process which had begun that very day when he had walked out of Stuart's place with three issues of Tremendous locked away in his briefcase. One of them, at Stuart's advisement, was vol. 1, no. 1 itself—the very first issue of the magazine, which had then been called Whizzing Planetoid Spheres in Orbit but whose name and copyright had been changed when the publisher collapsed six issues later. The line from Whizzing Planetoid to Tremendous, however, had been very clear, as Stuart had pointed out to him: both had had the important "Tek Room" feature and K. M. Conrad, the first and only editor of Tremendous, had had a novelette in the first issue of Whizzing Planetoid.
It had cost him $30.00 net, an enormous amount of money —the most money which he had ever spent on a given object for his personal use in his life—and he had decided to build the collection around it since, as Stuart had pointed out to him at their first meeting, the principle of the collector was to specialize rather than scatter his shots and he, Stuart, could tell right off that Fox had the stuff of the real collector. Indeed he did.
Stuart had explained to him that there existed in science fiction basically three types of people: "professionals," who wrote for or edited the magazines, "fans," who were a social organization built up around the magazines and who often contributed to the letter columns and built up a whole web of social activities and rivalries based on their mutual interest, and the "collectors," who were mostly involved with trying to build up an accumulation of these magazines. The categories were not really mutually exclusive. Many professionals had been fans at one time or another and fans were often collectors. But as it turned out, collectors really had little to do with fans and rarely became professionals, and professionals tended to come more from the ranks of fans than collectors, who the professionals considered to be a little strange for being so interested in what they, the professionals, often considered so much crap. Stuart had been loquacious and quite sincere. He said that he personally saw it as a hierarchy where the collectors were probably on top. The professionals all spent the money the minute it came in and there wasn't a good deal of money in the field to begin with. The fans were merely killing time because they had neither the funds nor the discipline to service their obsession. But the collectors were the only ones possessing something with a true sense of purpose.
"Personally, in spite of the fact that I deal in this stuff and sell it, I'm more of a fan than a collector," Stuart had conceded. "I mean, I'm willing to sell any of this stuff if I can meet my price. The thing is that I don't think I have the simple guts to be a collector because then you really got to risk yourself, really got to take chances and risk getting hurt, which always happens if you can't get an issue you need to fill in. But right away, having a chance to get to know you and talk to you like this, Izzinius, I can see right away that you're a collector; you have the interest of the true collector. There's a certain kind of guy, who, when he comes into this shop, I can see right away, just by the way that he handles himself, just by a certain look he gets in his eyes, that he's the real thing. I know you got it. I've seen a lot of guys like you come in here wanting to be collectors, and I'm happy to say that I got a lot of them started the right way, built them up into big collectors, celebrities in the big time. Even dealers at conventions. The thing is that you start off slow and build up and you never know what's going to happen to you.
"Take Billy Wilberson Key… I knew Billy just four years ago when he came in with a quarter to pick up last month's issue of Tremendous, which he had missed on the newsstand due to a case of flu. Billy who was just buying Tremendous and throwing it out, no interest at all, Billy and I had a good talk and I showed him around this place and filled him in and now Billy's the biggest collector on the East Coast. There's going to be a book about Billy published by one of the fans soon and he's been on radio in all the Southern states, talking about his collection. So you see anything can happen once you get started right/'
Fox had been fascinated and, in the weeks to come, he came to know Stuart very well. Far better, he was sure, than he had known any relative or dismal acquaintance in the city university let alone his coworkers in the department. Stuart had begun by coaching and guiding him into the proper channels and had then sat back, so to speak, while Fox took over the guidelines and started to tell Stuart what he needed and what rare issue he was seeking and what Stuart should try to get in stock for him next time. It had been, Stuart said, one of the most truly encouraging experiences of his life to see the way that Fox came along once he got involved; he had always known from the beginning that Izzinius had the stuff and to see him becoming a true collector was like watching a flower bloom in the desert.
"I'm proud of you, son," Stuart had told him confidentially, patting his back gently although Stuart was only three or four years older than Fox, maybe not even that. "I'm really proud of the way that you've come along. And if you don't mind I would like to say that I take some of the credit."
Then he had begun tentatively to urge Izzinius to come to meetings of the Solarians, go to vague conventions in the fall in distant cities, enter into some kind of fan contests. There was no reason that he could not be a valuable addition to fandom now with his growing collection standing behind him.
"But you said that fans and collectors didn't mix," Fox pointed out.
Stuart said no, that wasn't quite the case at all, they mixed very well; it was just that in many cases the fans didn't have true respect for the collectors because the collectors, while they went around getting every issue in sight and naming the contents pages for years back, didn't seem to know what the magazines were quite about. They were very good on titles but not so good on remembering plots or meaning, which led the fans to feel contemptuous about the collectors who they regarded only as strange neurotics poking and prowling rather aimlessly around the outskirts of something which the fans themselves considered vital.
But Fox was hardly in that category, Stuart had pointed out. He was not only a collector but a reading collector: one who took home all the magazines to carefully study and absorb and whose knowledge of those magazines was in many cases as good as that of the professionals. This was the land of person who was most valuable in fandom, Stuart had explained, because most of the fans, unfortunately, were so involved in their social lives and clubs and feuds that they had less and less time to actually read this stuff and thus were always in urgent need of someone competent like Fox, who had the files and kept up with the professionals, and who would be able to keep them abreast of the latest affairs in the external world of publishing.
Nevertheless, Fox had resisted, remembering Stuart's original distinction, and resolved that he would do nothing whatsoever to compromise his new and important sense of dedication. "I'm a collector," he found himself murmuring at odd intervals during the day, say, when he was making a phone call to a landlord or killing time in the stall in the lavatory, trying to pretend for the benefit of the supervisors that he had diarrhea and could not possiblv discharge his duties that day no matter how he tried. "I'm a collector; I collect things; I have an important stock of rare issues." And the feeling of pride and identity which had gone through him during these monologues was often so powerful, so truly consequential, that he was unable and unwilling to perform his job duties for the given day.
The thing was that his new passion trivialized everything, not only the job, even his mother. He moved away from her in the third month of his passion when she began to make comments about the strange magazines filling up her son's room; he simply put everything under cotton in a new valise and took off, went into Browning's rooms on a chance. And there, for the first time, was able to set up his collection properly, putting it all on the floor in narrow, carefully centered stacks so that the magazines would not have to be stored in the abnormal upright position (Stuart had warned him about this) and could get plenty of even pressure and air to sustain their pulp. Now the knowledge that he could come home at any hour and sit in isolation to consider his collection at leisure, without any pressure whatsoever, made the job itself almost unbearable: all that Fox found himself thinking of during this time was his selection of rare issues and the covers of magazines he felt particularly desirable. Sometimes the very aspect of the scenes he would occupy would seem to shimmer and dissolve in favor of a glowing cover, a contents page.
Looking at it objectively, Fox supposed that he was succumbing to a massive and somehow overriding obsession, but there was no question of objective. How could one possibly be detached when confronted by what was nothing less than a singular opportunity to encompass the whole of his life within a set of artifacts. He was not only pos-sessing the magazines themselves; through them he had hold for the first time of a very dangerous and tricky past— a past which for once seemed to have acquired some kind of form and order.
"May 1949," he found himself mumbling, sometimes to his supervisors or clients at odd moments. "June 1950, October 1948, Oliver, Tyson, Steele and Conrad."
His hours at work began to dwindle as he used more and more of his field time (during which he was supposedly visiting various recipients of relief and restoration and thus building up the favorable public relations image of the agency) to go hunting for rare issues. Stuart remained his main source, of course, but he found a couple of other magazine stores in the neighborhood, one of which had a truly remarkable collection of Thoughtfuls in mint condition and all of which did not seem to know, as Stuart and Izzinius did, the sheer value of their goods. Whereas Stuart was charging him fifty cents for any issue of anything, no matter how recent or battered, these rival stores would often let their goods go for a dime or less; once, to astonished wonder, he was able to pick up a full year's run of Saturn, Pluto, Mercury and Mars (a magazine of fantasy) for fifty-five cents from a grim old bookshop keeper who helped Fox smuggle these copies into his briefcase with a series of strange glares, twitches and convulsions, mumbling in the meantime that he could not understand, simply could not understand, those goddamned magazine collectors.
But the trouble with the other magazine shops was that in not knowing the rare and precious value of their goods they paid little regard to them: stored them unevenly, sold them erratically, did not have anything approaching completion. And so, when Fox had used them to fill out the fringes of some minor collections, he found himself driven back to Stuart, who at least understood and who, at all times, could be counted upon to at least attempt a search for a rare issue for a modest deposit. There was no sense in exaggerating Stuart's worth. He was venal. He charged too much. He tended to lie about his stock and, most surprisingly, he did very little if any reading whatsoever of his magazines. But Stuart was still the most dependable dealer in the city, which, along with the fact that he had introduced Fox to the pursuit in the first place, meant that he was owed the most unusual loyalty. Fox gave it to him as the very least that he could do.
It was inevitable then that he would have to quit his job: his collection, his growing desires, and the need to put full time into cataloguing, indexing, arranging and purchases meant that he could no longer give to the department that which it so much needed. So he put in his notice, withdrew his balance from the pension fund, and moved full time into the collection business at about the same point in time that he became involved with both Susan and the Rhelm people. He did not choose to see any collaboration beyond coincidence in these two elements. In the first place the Rhelm people were malevolent while Susan was only mildly curious. And in the second place Susan could not possess the organizational ability, the sheer motivation and drive which seized the aliens. She explained to him often that she was merely going through a blank period in her life and intended to apply herself to something meaningful in just a little time, six months or so; but in the meantime science fiction provided her with a social outlet and she was having a genuine voyage of self-discovery in Browning's rooming house thanks to her growing sense of individuality and her growing realization that the world as a totality was insane—thanks to her close observations of Browning.
"He's just the same as you, Izzie, only in reverse," she had confided to him during one late-night discussion when, unable to sleep, she had come down to his room, taking him away frem the August 1947 Tremendous. "You want to collect things and hold them all to yourself and Browning wants to put his possessions with everyone else; you want to dilate and he wants to expand."
Fox knew about dilation because doors and spaceships and people were always doing it in the magazines, but he was damned if he could see how this applied to him. He felt personally that he was expanding his horizons. For the first time that agonizing feeling of delimitation which had dogged him since his father's untimely death seemed to have left him. Then the Rhelm people got serious and things worked into a different stage.
Well, that was the way it was: win and lose. Life's a lottery; if you finally got involved in something that made you truly happy and fulfilled you were bound to find that new problems came up. It had been too good to be true after all. He bore the first visits of the Rhelm people (or his visits to them, he was never quite sure how to define this) almost cheerfully, a sense of humorous resignation controlling his responses. And for the first couple of times it hadn't been too bad at all, but then they had shown him that they weren't kidding around in jthe least. They were, in fact, damned serious, and things had taken a difficult turn.
Fox knew he was in a tight spot. He felt like one of the heroes in a Tech Jones serial now: hounded on all sides by malevolent, marauding aliens whose only motivation in destroying him seemed to be in keeping events going. But unlike Tech Jones's heroes he felt neither competent nor particularly desirable; in fact he felt that he was stumbling endlessly through a viscous agglomeration of matter, trying to find his way from the grayness into a corridor, in the corridor lurked marauders of a different hue, and in the control room more assassins yet, but he would win through. He would overcome; he would see the end of this.
Was it possible that Izzinius Fox could have lived so long, struggled so hard, sustained so much history merely to come to an abysmal end? It was not. And at the center of his despair lay a cheerful faith, a sense of abandoned commitment which he knew would sustain him as far as he had to go, incised into him with the same radiant sense of knowledge that was given him by the possession of a Rare Issue, an issue that he knew everyone else wanted but which only he had. And had it filed away. In mint condition. Neatly stacked on the floor of his rooms. Safe from everything but the prowls of Browning who, in addition to everything else, did not understand science fiction.
The Rhelm people get him on the way to the Solarians.
Once again there is no feeling of transition, not even a warning. One instant he is walking with Susan toward the subway stop (they will go up to One Hundred and Tenth Street, transfer to the West Side Broadway local and ride up two more stops to Teddy Wilkes's apartment which is the place of the meeting this week), talking quietly, feeling the absent brush of her hand in his, trying to stay on her left as a gentleman is supposed to although her weaving gait tends to put him more and more in the gutter, and the next he is wrenched inside, pulled outside, turned into pulp and transported mindless miles to the interior of the spaceship. He does not even have a chance to warn Susan what is happening to him; not that it would make any difference since all of this happens in no-time and she will not even know that he has been gone.
He finds himself seated, unbound, in the center of a circle. The circle is composed of aliens and they are talking cheerfully to one another, seemingly unaware of his presence. This goes on for quite a long time and Fox, with a discovered sense of delicacy, feels that he would be wrong to interrupt; they seem to be so engaged with one another. Animation is so rare that he is pleased to see it, even on this level.
The Arch-Leader strides in, carrying something which looks, to Fox's bedazzled eyes, vaguely like a movie projector. He waves at Fox cheerfully, enters into deep conference with two of the aliens, who get up and begin to do things with the projector-thing, seemingly trying to put it in working order. For some reason, this gives them dif-ficulty and they begin to chatter at one another unhappily in their foreign tongue although, strangely, Fox can discern certain phrases which sound to him amazingly like "dirty bastards, sons of bitches, goddamned hell" and the like. Eventually, they do something to their satisfaction and withdraw.
The Arch-Leader comes to Fox's side and says, "I ask you again, have you changed your mind?"
"No," Fox says. "I have not changed my mind. I happen to be on very important business now—"
"We can't be concerned with that," the Arch-Leader says rather sharply. "Your personal life is of only personal importance; we are talking here of the fate of the universe. Come now, Fox, be reasonably sane about this. Won't you turn over the December '46 Tremendous to us?"
"No," he says. "I won't turn it over." The whole thing would be vaguely thrilling if he did not have the feeling that he had gone through this too many times already to sustain any sense of drama, let alone significance. "I won't betray my people. Earth triumphant! Ruling over the galaxy! Timeless search for destiny! Peoples of the world! Buy your own goddamned rare issue if you want; Stuart Wiseman could get it for you."
"Most unfortunate," the Arch-Leader says. "I thought that you might have reconsidered but, as with almost everything on this mission, I have been wrong. Do you realize, Fox, that due only to your egregious stubbornness I run the risk of being dropped from L-71 to L-68, for no reason other than the fact that you refuse to face simple reality? But of course the penalty is always paid by the innocent. Very well, then, are you ready for the torture to begin?"
"I'd rather not," Fox says, feeling a vague squeamish-ness in his joints. The fact is that he has always been something of a physical coward and reminding himself that nothing that the aliens can do can destroy him or go on for more than a few minutes is not, under the circumstances, particularly helpful. "Why don't you just respect my, uh, ideals, and I'll try to respect yours? There must be millions of people who would be happy to help you out."
"Ah, well," the Arch-Leader says. "We will begin on the psychological level, which, in any event, is usually the more effective with the so-called sentient races. You have no doubt noticed our machinery which happens to be a Lamn-ing Vault Projector, catalogue number 4687B, and which has the ability to project scenes on a screen very much as one of your own products might. What we intend to do, Fox, is to try to show you some scenes of your past life. We find this to be strongly effective. All that you have to do is watch although, of course, if you feel a certain low necessity to scream I guess we can go along with that. It's all up to you, of course."
At the realization that his torture will be "emotional" rather than "physical," at the sound of the wonderful word "psychological" which in the alien's speech-organ seems to roll itself into a limp and delicate construction not entirely unlike the Oriental languages, Fox feels a sensation of relief and release so profound that he feels that he is about to sob. He has been offered the surest proof that the aliens cannot really touch him and, in the bargain, knowing that his mind is stronger than any of the minds which oppose him, he feels on the instant a sense of enormous release stirring through him with such power and constancy that it even diminishes that more trivial kind of relief which he felt, an hour or so before, with Susan. Surely there is nothing she can offer him ever, nothing that any girl can offer him, that would surpass the feeling of power he has now.
"All right," he says, leaning back on his palms and crossing his legs; a rather difficult bit of acrobatics on the slick and shiny floor, but something he accomplishes with ease. "If that's the way it's got to be, that's the way it's got to be, I guess."
He tries to put a little bit of trepidation in his tone. Obviously, it would stand him in better stead if the aliens thought that he was intimidated. There is no sense, truly, in pushing things.
"I don't like what you're doing to me, and I'm very afraid, but I'll never give in. Never," he adds, with what he feels to be a nice blend of terror and bravado.
"What we will do," the Arch-Leader says, "is run these scenes to completion, Fox. There is no way we will stop once we get started and the whole thing could be very unpleasant. Would you like to reconsider your decision?"
"Never," he says, and the Arch-Leader says "Excellent." with perhaps a little more pleasure than would be expected under the circumstances and the lights go out.
For a moment Fox feels an apprehensive twitch at the sound of the alien's voice, much as if something is in preparation beyond Fox's expectations—and the alien knows this. But then it goes away; he is too absorbed, after all, in looking at the events depicted on the white screen which has appeared in ghastly illumination on the upper edges of the room in front of him. A series of yellow and green flickers around the edges and then the film is rolling. It is in black and white with the aspect of a 1930s horror film but the sound in particular is penetrating and bright and clear and Fox finds that he can not only apprehend everything without trouble but, indeed, cannot escape it.
He is looking at a movie of himself sitting with his father in Madison Square Garden, watching a roller derby. He appears to be eleven or twelve here but this is not absolutely sure; his father took him to the roller derby from his eighth birthday to his fourteenth and Fox was one of those men who undertook a delayed adolescence, emerging only into his slack-jawed maturity at eighteen. Thus he could be as young as nine here or perhaps as old as fourteen.
His old man is wearing a checkered vest and an emblem which says NEW YORK CHIEFS and is waving a pennant similarly inscribed. On his left sleeve is a large heart-shaped piece of cloth on which the name TUFFY BRE-SHEEN has been sewn. And it is this arm which he is using to wave the pennant, urging the New York Chiefs on to more success. Tuffy Bresheen, who had been the female star of the Chiefs during the late 1930s, had been one of his father's grand passions. He had once gotten her autograph in a delicatessen, written "To Milton, With Affection." Since then he and his image of Tuffy had been in-, separable. He mentioned her several times a day, often interrupting otherwise dull family meals to tell his wife that if Tuffy Bresheen skated like Fox's mother cooked she would probably have broken her neck several years ago.
Fox sees that he is, in the movie, sitting next to his father quietly: his usual stunned, detached aspect at these games; shaking his head and trying in this way to convince people in adjoining seats (it all comes back to him now) that he is seated next to this lunatic only by coincidence and has absolutely nothing to do with him, being a roller derby fan on his own hook. It is not very convincing and a feeling of woe spreads over the younger Fox's features, so deep and intense, so stricken and driven, that Fox, watching the movie, finds himself twitching in response; it has been a long time since he has remembered how truly painful his childhood was and, indeed, he has managed to convince himself that there was nothing wrong with his ju-venescence at all. It was perfectly normal. A little yellowed and frozen at the edges, perhaps, but basically the same kind of existence which all of his contemporaries were being put through. But looking at this film, Fox comes to understand that it was not that simple at all and that he must have been suffering at the time even more than he would admit.
The soundtrack of the film snaps on violently and Fox hears crowd noises, screams, squeals, vague hoarse shouts in the background for blood.
"Kill those sonsofbitches!" a heavy man seated behind Fox and his father shouts.
His father half rises to his seat, waving the pennant and screams, "You yellow bastards, you ain't got no guts! Skate 'em down, Ray, skate 'em down! Knock them over!"
The younger Fox cringes in his seat, runs a thin adolescent hand over his forehead, sighs heavily, as his father nudges him in the ribs and says, "Listen, don't you care? Don't you even know what's going on here? Didja see that foul?"
"No," Fox says and tries to duck down in his seat. But his father's hand falls on a shoulder, squeezing the boy into enormous pain, and he sits bolt upright, a look of shrieking pain in his eyes and says, "I saw it, I saw it!"
His father releases his grip and says, "You don't pay no goddamned attention. I never take you to this game again," which both the older and younger Fox knew perfectly well to be a lie because his father took him to every roller derby match held in New York for a period of several years, two or three times a week on the average, sometimes as many as four or five, and refused under any circumstances to let Fox seek his own devices.
"It's a wonderful sport; it'll make a man of you," his fa-ther had said. "You see a little mental toughness out there, a little physical mayhem, and you'll understand what life is really like. It isn't all a bowl of soup, you know."
Since Fox's father was a physical coward who spent the majority of his time either seeking or drawing unemployment insurance, there is a kind of ironic undertow to this advisement. But neither the present nor the past Foxes are able to take much comfort from this since the dreadful violence of the roller derby seems to virtually vibrate, one could say pulse, in the elder Fox's frame during his period of spectatorship and if he were to knock his son unconscious right here and now out of some vagrant streak of enthusiasm or response, it would certainly not be the first time and probably not the last.
The camera switches to a close-up of the roller derby itself: men and women skating frankly on a circular rink which, although made of wood, glistens with the coldness of ice; sticks swinging; faces dripping; mouths screaming. The object of the roller derby, of course, is for one member of a given team to skate ahead and completely lap every member of the other, thus scoring a single point (and a certain number of points becoming a "match"). These efforts are known as "sprints" and the participants are allowed to use any means to impede or assist the sprinter, which usually consists of members of his team attempting to act like blocking backs in football and shunt the opposition off the track while the opposition, in turn, tries to find a "hole" in the wall of fullbacks and, in getting to the sprinter, knock him completely off the track and into the seats where, for all they care, he should lie dead for a considerable length of time.
The women's teams, which wear the same emblems and alternate with the men, are particularly vicious. And since it is the women who are skating now, it is all that Fox can do to continue looking at the film. In close-up (although once he had thought they were sexually attractive) all the women look like dreadful avenging hags and are shouting oaths and imprecations at one another as they try to clear a path for one of their number: a broad-shouldered, mighty woman in her early thirties who is trying to engage in a sprint.
"Come on, Tuffy, you big bitch!" his father shrieks as the camera swings back to his face. "Knock them all dead, you animal you!"
The elder Fox swings his hand aimlessly, catching the younger Fox with a mighty cuff; the younger Fox, seems to shudder and huddle in upon himself. Fox, himself, feels suddenly that he cannot look at this anymore. Seeing the movie at this time and in this way has suddenly made him realize something that he had never seen before and which insight he had sedulously avoided during that period of his life when he was capable of making it: he understands suddenly and with a kind of total clarity what his father had hoped to obtain from the roller derby (and what he never got) and he shouts "Stop it! Stop it!" staggering to his feet, looking hopelessly around the spaceship for, of all things, a light.
The Arch-Leader says behind him in a deadly monotone, "Of course we're not shutting this off, Izzinius. Do you think that it's as easy as that? Do you think that you can bury the past merely by escaping it? Sit and watch it!"
Shuddering, Fox feels himself slammed to his knees. His gaze is on the screen and Tuffy Bresheen is on a sprint; her skates coming down on the wood with clattering, stomping sounds that seem to shake the very projector, her mouth open and screaming, her stick held high above her head. "Whoopee!" she shrieks and knocks a small woman completely off the track and into the field. "Take that!" and clears the field fully.
The camera switches back to his father again, who has now risen to his feet and, leaning over, his hands cupped around his mouth is saying: "GET THEM, TUFFIE. GET THOSE DIRTY BITCHES. YOU CAN DO IT!"
Tuffee screams "Whoopee!" again while people in sur-rounding seats look at his father in terror and awe.
And then the younger Fox is on his feet, screaming too, tugging his father by the elbow and saying, "Stop it. Stop this. It's got to stop, I can't stand it anymore," as the old man calmly, shatteringly, hits him on the head and the younger Fox falls back on his seat, gasping.
"Stop it!" Fox is screaming. "Stop this, for the love of God. I can't take it anymore!" And the lights go on, finally. Aliens, he is surrounded by aliens, all of them looking at him with wonder. The Arch-Leader, leaning over, is saying with infinite patience and warmth, "See, Izzinius, do you see it now? There are certain things about the way you people are constructed that permit you no surcease. You can never forget; you will never forget. It's always there, Izzinius."
And Fox says, "I can't stand this. I truly can't stand it."
"Well, of course you can't," the Arch-Leader says. "Who ever said that any one of you could? But our time is up, Izzinius, well have to let you return now. We expect to find you a lot more reasonable the next time, Izzinius. We'll be waiting for those transcripts." The scene goes away, everything goes away, and he is walking with Susan west on One Hundred and Nineteenth Street near Columbia University, gasping unevenly, sweat dripping down the panels of his face.
She turns and looks at him to say, "My God, did it happen again?" Speechless, he blinks his eyes and she says, not stopping (because they are late for the Solarians), "Was it bad?"
"Pretty bad; the worst yet. I don't think I can stand this anymore."
She says, squeezing his hand and lengthening her pace, "Well, then, Izzinius, we'll just have to do something about this."
For the moment, disoriented as he is, he has the horrid sensation that she is Tuffy Bresheen moving out on a sprint, but his shriek becomes a bubble in the haste and cold. In time he is able to remind himself that this is Susan, only Susan, and one way or the other she is taking him to some people who can help him. He believes. He wants to believe. On the other hand, there is always the possibility that all of these people whom he will see came out of circumstances exactly similar, in which case, he is in even deeper trouble than usual because he does not see how anybody who went through the particular set of experiences which he did is capable of making logical choices, let alone moving on them toward meaningful ends. It is all a bit too much for Fox.
And it occurs to him only then, after all of this, that his father never took him to a roller derby game in his life.
The meeting of the Solarians is to occur in Teddy Wilkes's apartment on the fifth floor of an old apartment building near Columbia University. Getting into the elevator with Susan, two strange men, and a large dog, Fox closes his eyes, tries to cancel his usual apprehensions about self-service elevators (What if it stopped in mid-passage? Who would rescue them? Who would care to rescue them?) as it inches upward in a series of hideous creaks and whines. The cables seeming to barely sustain the car as it shoves its odorous weight upward.
"This is the first building on the block to have one of these automatic elevators. Isn't that wonderful?" Susan whispers, and Fox says that he supposes it is.
The men get off at the third floor although the dog, strangely reluctant, gives Fox a series of pleading, grievous looks as it is shoved out of the elevator with curses. The animal emits a high, piercing whine as the doors close, and Fox wonders pointlessly if it is somehow related to the Arch-Leader. He doubts the theory very much, but it is as sensible as most of the things which have been happening to him recently.
"Don't worry about a thing," Susan whispers as he feels the cable once again yank them upward. She strokes his elbow, puts a finger cheerfully in his side and pokes him. "They're nice people and everything's going to be fine. They'll be glad to meet you."
"I don't see the point," Fox mutters, "that's all. It's nothing at all personal but I just don't see the point," and would go on to expound on this theory except that the elevator, thankfully, groans into place at the fifth floor and releases them.
They stumble into the hall, Fox semitripping on the way out because the car does not come evenly to floor level, and find the door of the apartment on their left open. From it come sounds of classical music. Maybe it is Bee-thovan's Eroica symphony. But Fox has never liked music too much and does not care.
A large, sweating, bearded young man bounds out of the door and takes Susan by the arm. "Hello!" he says and runs his lips through her hair, then straightens her up and looks at her intently for a moment. "We're in the soup tonight, Sykes is flying again."
Then he takes note of Fox who has been looking at him with perhaps more astonishment than is truly explicable under the circumstances. The man, or perhaps he is a boy (it is very difficult to tell because of the beard and a certain confused look around the eyes which has more of an adolescent glint than manly glower), bends down to Susan and says, "Who is he? Is he friend? Is he fan? Is he foe?" And then, finding this apparently to be almost unbearably funny, moves off into a high-pitched giggle, which excludes Fox and Susan, as well as a series of chokes and sputters, well internalized; and things run their course which, as far as Fox can judge, takes several seconds.
"Oh stop it, Teddy," Susan says and slaps the man on the wrist. "You know perfectly well that there are only friends, here. This is Izzinius Fox, whom I've been telling you about. He's finally decided to come to one of our meetings. Izzy, this is Teddy Wilkes about whom you've heard so much."
"Oh, I haven't heard that much," Fox says. Which is probably not the right thing to say under the circumstances for Teddy Wilkes gives him a look of sheer loathing moderating only slightly toward the end to bemusement.
"Well, I haven't heard that much either about you, Fox. You're that collector, right?" He begins to prod them toward the door. "You're a little early," he says, "but then again these damned things never do start right on time. Why don't you just kind of get organized and watch Sykes for a little while? He's really carrying on. We're going to discuss Thoughtful tonight, Fox," he says, "I don't know if that would interest you very much though; you're a Tremendous man, I understand. This usually happens with people who can't adjust to new things, they hold onto the old stuff. Well, live and learn, why don't you just go right in."
Fox finds himself behind Susan in a long hallway. Wilkes slams the door behind them, gives Fox another glower and then disappears. The sounds of the Eroica are much louder now, of course, and Fox perceives that there is something wrong with the music; it seems to be higher pitched and at a much faster tempo than the performances he is accustomed to. And then, in a moment, he understands: this is probably one of the new microgroove records, the 33%, and Wilkes is playing it at a higher speed. It doesn't seem to make too much difference to Susan who smiles and nods and allows her hips to move a little more than is strictly necessary as she walks ahead of him into the living room, where she is instantly seized by two large and unbearded men who engage her in intense conversation, winding her toward the couch. Fox finds himself momentarily at loose ends.
There are seven or eight people in this large living room. In addition to Susan, the two men who have commandeered her, and Wilkes (who is now standing in a stiff posture by a bookcase, a pipe stuck between his jaws, reacting to the music with slow heaves and groans), three other men occupy positions of solitude at various ends of the room, standing immobile, a strange catatonic freeze seeming to come over them as they stare blindly at the lights.
In the center of the room a small desk and chair, probably for the purposes of formal meeting, have been placed. And this further restricts movement so that the combination of limited circles of space, along with the harsh overhead glinting of the lights, gives the room a rather surrealistic aspect The interesting thing, to Fox, is that it looks in many ways strangely like the spaceship of the Rhelm people and he feels himself, pondering this, on the verge of a large insight, something having to do with the endless similarity of all sentient life, everywhere. (But perhaps again the spaceship is this room and his hallucinations have merely found extrinsic collaboration: what he must keep in mind at all times is the omnipresent realization that he might be insane; if he can hold onto that it may end up being the only small piece of sanity in the entire affair.) He is interrupted by one of the three single males who comes over to him, taps him on the elbow, and without any introduction or prelude says, "What do you think of the Graffanatis faction? I mean, what's your position?"
"Graffanatis?" Fox said. "I don't think I know who or what you're talking about."
"Oh for Christ's sake," the man says. "Who is Wilkes bringing into these meetings? Is he really trying to pack them for ignorance? The Graffanatis faction, Miles Graffanatis, his position on the Plutonians. Don't you know what I'm talking about?" He is a small intense man in, perhaps, his early twenties; his face pockmarked by the remainders of an acne he has more or less successfully sabotaged with a clever, if too public, application of talcum. "You don't really want to talk about it do you?" he says. "You're going to play it cagy and innocent until the vote comes up and then you'll play it down the line. I wouldn't put anything past Wilkes, but why doesn't he let us pack the meetings?"
"I'm sorry," Fox says. "I really don't know what you're talking about."
At that moment, fortunately (for he is truly glad to see him), Wilkes comes over, clasps the small man by the hand and says, "Are you bothering my friend, Izzinius Fox? You really ought to watch that kind of stuff, Hollowaite; you just leap on people and before they know what's going on you've got them bound up. This is Harlow Hollowaite," he says to Fox. "He's not really a member, only an observer so to speak; don't listen to a thing that he says. Actually he's from the Graffanatis faction."
Hollowaite, for all of his small size, seems to expand with rage when he hears this, literally suspending himself from the floor, and says, "Wilkes, that's an evil and deadly . thing to say and I won't stand for it. I don't have to take your abuse; I was in the Solarians before you were even a fan."
"Oh, all right," Wilkes says with a heavy chuckle and turns his back on both of them, motions to a corner and says, "Leave her alone, Sykes!" Blocked by the back of Wilkes, Fox can only guess what is going on but he assumes that the as-yet invisible Sykes has been making gestures toward Susan and he tries to move toward Wilkes's side and forward to protect her… but finds himself intercepted by Wilkes who says to him, "That Sykes, that Sykes, he is really crazy."
"No he isn't," Harlow Hollowaite says. "He's the only sane man in the room except for me, now that you've gone and cracked up, Wilkes. You just don't understand his methods," and bursts into a thin, groaning cackle which much disconcerts Fox and for the moment dissuades him from moving toward Susan.
The Solarians are a very strange group, there is no question about it. He is quite sure that he has never been at anything quite like this before. But shaken as he is by the Rhelm people, their torture, Susan's anticipation, and his own dread, he is unable to make the kind of patient evaluation which he supposes he will get to later. The thing seems to be that they are all crazy.
The bell behind the open door rings and Wilkes, nodding vaguely, detaches himself to go there. Fox finds that he is looking straight on at Susan and the aforementioned Sykes; they seem to be in intense conversation on the couch. Sykes is a totally bald young man of thirty or so. As he approaches them Fox notes that Sykes has the ponderous gestures and delivery of a man much older and is so absorbed in whatever he is saying that he does not even notice Fox until Susan, looking up in the middle of a paragraph, smiles at him and says, "Steven, this is my friend, Izzinius Fox. He has the biggest file of Tremendous in the neighborhood and he's a wonderful collector of other things, too. You remember I was telling you about him?"
"No," Sykes says without looking up. "Susan, why are you interrupting me? Why are you diverting me from my course? Are you too my enemy, the enemy of free thought and expression lodged deep in the foul bosom of Teddy Wilkes's Solarians? Never a chance; never a chance. So when all of this was done, Graffanatis, he turns to me and do you know what he says? 'Screw the Solarians!' he says. 'I don't give a damn if the Solarians disintegrate! They are a dead issue, the hand of a dead past lying heavily upon the fair brow of science fiction!' I was amazed. I never heard of anything like it. The gall—"
"He's talking aoout Miles Graffanatis," Susan says. "The leader of the Plutonians."
"Yes," Fox says. "I already heard something about that."
"The Plutonians are a rival group. Miles was president of the Solarians until last month but then he took a splinter faction away and formed the Plutonians."
"Susan," Sykes says and puts a hand on her rib cage, draws it up toward her neck (which means that the bald man fondles her breasts intimately, but there is no sexuality in the gesture at all; he could be running his hand over a magazine cover and Susan shows no reaction, so Fox decides that he had better take no notice of this whatsoever; he is already in deep waters), "Susan, I wish you would outgrow this infantile pedanticism, this seeming need to explain the inexplicable to those who cannot understand."
"Sure he understands," Susan says. "He's an old friend. He lives in my rooming house."
"I don't care if he lives in your bed. There is no way that you can explain Miles Graffanatis to him. Unless," Sykes says, coming to a dead halt and looking up at Fox for the first time with strange, glittering eyes that seem to weave in his skull, "unless of course he comes from Miles Graffanatis and you've smuggled him into our meeting. That would explain everything, wouldn't it? This new stranger. The lack of true introduction. The inadequate cover story. The failure of this man to speak up and fully identify himself. That would explain everything, wouldn't it?" He fixes Fox with a dull stare, his lips working unevenly and says, "Explain yourself! Justify yourself! Describe your position, your ambitions, your mode!"
"I really can't," Fox says. "I'm only a collector."
"He's only a collector, Sykes," Susan says, patting the bald man's knees. "Really, he knows nothing about fandom."
"But not so sure about fanac, eh?" Sykes says. "You can have a little fanac outside of fandom, can't you? A ringer! Graffanatis sneaked into us a ringer!"
"Oh come on, Sykes," Susan says. "He's perfectly innocent. Besides the Plutonians have a policy of noninvolve-ment."
"I don't trust you," Sykes says, but his voice has diminished to a murmur. Sighing, he stands and says, "I should talk to Wilkes about my suspicions right now. Before this meeting slides into peril and disaster I should unburden myself of this difficult apogee or perhaps the word I am seeking is merely epiphany." He stumbles off shaking his head.
Fox slides down on the couch next to Susan and says, "1 don't understand what's going on here. I mean to say that I never met any people quite like this in my life."
"Oh they're very nice," she says, nodding briskly. "The Solarians are a very nice bunch. What you've got to do, Izzinius, is come out of your shell and realize that it takes all kinds to make a world." Her eyes, however, are not on him but on the door. As she stares abstractedly there is another peal on the doorbell and then Stuart Wiseman comes into the room, wearing a green vest, Windsor knot, and red jacket, which gives him a more illustrious appearance than Fox would have believed possible.
"But listen," Fox says hurriedly, leaning over to whisper into her ear, "listen, Susan, you really can't expect me to just tell these people what's going on with me? How could they possibly understand?"
"You've got to get over these feelings of inferiority, Izzie," she says. "You're just as important and meaningful as anybody in this room and your trouble is that you have a low opinion of yourself. You'll just speak right up and they'll listen." Her voice, however, seems to contain very little conviction or energy.
Stuart has recognized him and plows through the room, stands in front of Fox, hands in pockets and says, "Well, I see that you came after all. Of course, you had better inducements than I could offer you, I'll admit that. What does bring you here, Fox?"
"Nothing much," Izzinius says.
"Hello, Stuart," says Susan. She seems to be staring at some point of space behind him.
"Hello, Susan. Are you and Izzinius here friends?"
"Yes," Fox says.
"I don't know what you'd call it," says Susan.
"Well, whatever," Stuart says and slides comfortably down on the couch between them, looks at Susan with some amusement and says, "you seem to be very tired tonight."
"I don't feel like talking too much, Stuart."
"You're not telling this man bad things about me, are you? You're not filling him full of tales of Stuart's venality and unction, could you be? After all, Susan, we're old friends."
"I don't feel like talking," Susan says. "Leave me alone, will you Stuart? Anyway, it looks like the meeting is going to be called to order now, we've got to be very quiet."
"She's a very self-involved person," Stuart says to Fox. "She tries to act as if other people's consequences meant something to her, but the fact is that she's too self-involved. You ought to be less self-involved, don't you think so, Susan? I met Miles Graffanatis in the shop this afternoon, he has some very nice things to say to you."
"I want to listen to the meeting," she says.
"What do you think of Miles Graffanatis?" Stuart says to Fox. "I suppose you've been filled in on the scandal."
"Not at all," Fox says. There seem to be peculiar crosscurrents, undertows, winds of change sweeping through, and he feels more than slightly at sea. It is something like but practically worse than his conference with the Arch-Leader who at least has simulated frankness; what is going on inside Stuart and Susan at this moment strikes Fox as being of somewhat darker nature than anything which the aliens can foist on him. "I mean I just came because Susan wanted me to; I'm not a member of anything. I have no position. I'm not a fan, I'm a collector."
"Well, no time like the present, eh, Izzie?" Stuart says vaguely while Wilkes, who has come to stand behind the desk, begins to rap a large metal gavel rather aimlessly on its surfaces.
"Come to order!" Wilkes says, "The meeting is now in session!" Groaning, the Solarians take their places; most of them on the floor in front of Wilkes, Hollowaite, and another small man leaning from chairs somewhat to the rear of the desk. The Eroica is shut off. "This is the four hundred and seventeenth regular meeting of the Solarians," Wilkes says, "and we'll get right into it. First I want the old business and then we'll have the new business. But first the recording secretary should read the minutes of the last meeting."
Hollowaite stands and says, "I didn't take any minutes. I'm no longer recording secretary. I resign," and sits down as the room begins to fill with noise. "I don't have to take this kind of humiliation anymore!" he shouts.
Wilkes pounds the gavel and finally there is a kind of silence and Wilkes says, "we were aware of your resignation already, Harlow. All right. Does anyone want to give us a verbal summary of our previous meeting?"
Susan stands energetically and says, "Come off it, Teddy. This is no time for formal procedure or anything like that. I've brought along my friend, Izzinius Fox, who has some very important things to say and—"
"Point of order!" the man next to Hollowaite shouts, standing. "Point of order, we must proceed in a regular fashion; there is to be none of this!"
"Hear her out!" Sykes says against the wall. "Hear her out. She's probably detailed from the Plutonians anyway and Graffanatis will know everything that goes on—"
"I am not detailed from the Plutonians," Susan says, shaking with rage. "I have nothing to do with the Plutonians, Sykes, and I want to remind you that the night of the walkout I was the one who stayed here and defended the principles of the Solarians. Where were you, Sykes? I didn't see you after the meeting! You went out with Graffanatis, didn't you!"
"You lousy bitch!" Sykes shrieks and Wilkes slams the gavel while the room surges with noise.
Fox finds Stuart slamming him enthusiastically on the knee and saying, "Now, it will come out! Now will come out the truth!" and Fox stands to try to avoid the force of the blows which is really considerable under the circumstances.
"I don't have to take this!" Sykes screams. "If there's any disloyalty in this room, we know exactly from whence it comes and those parties will be dealt with most strongly!"
"Oh keep quiet," Susan says with enormous self-possession, her demeanor not only seemingly unaffected by Sykes's outburst but even improved. "We know exactly who you are, Sykes, all of the true Solarians in this room, and we aren't frightened any more. As I was saying, I brought along my friend, Izzinius Fox, who has some truly remarkable things to tell all of us and I think that this is so important that we ought to get to it right away. Now, Iz-zie—"
"Point of order!" Hollowaite shrieks. "We either proceed according to the constitution of this organization or we do not proceed at all. Anarchy may be for Graffanatis but we, I remind you, come from a better tradition and are more mature people."
"Then why did you resign as secretary?" Susan says, a remark which turns Hollowaite purple with rage. Then she turns to Wilkes and says, "Really, Teddy, I think that's the best way to do this. Izzinius came all the way up from the 70s to talk to us and this is very important. I know the whole story already."
"And so does Graffanatis!" Sykes bellows. "And everything going on here!"
"All right," Wilkes says, slamming the gavel abstractedly, "Enough of this. We can no longer sustain these feuds and petty anxieties and sustain our mission as Solarians. Susan is quite right, we have to proceed in an orderly way. But I really don't know if we should—" He comes to a stop and stares blindly around the room, seeming suddenly at sea. "I mean, I don't think we can just—"
"All right," Stuart says, slamming Fox on the knee again and standing. "I think that we can get a modicum of organization into this organization. I've been dealing with Fox for many months now and I can vouch for the fact that he's an honorable man, certainly has nothing to do with the Graffanatis faction, and will not compromise us in any way if we listen to what he has to say. Why don't we let Izzinius speak and then we can make some resolutions or something? The trouble with Susan is that she makes everything antagonistic, it has to be a battle, she doesn't understand that—"
"Listen here, Stuart," Susan says. But Wilkes slams the gavel with more power this time and, seeming to have been aided by Stuart's speech, says, "I think that the motion is on the floor. It Ls herewith resolved that the Solarians should hear, uh, Izzinius Fox tell us something. All those in favor—"
"Point of order!" Hollowaite says as the man next to him says, "Point of personal privilege!" Both go to their feet as they stare at one another with bemusement, then shake their heads and sit down.
"I hear a vote on the floor," Wilkes says. "Now, all those in favor say aye." There is silence and Susan, Stuart, Wilkes, a tall man in the corner, and Hollowaite say aye. "All those opposed say nay." Sykes shakes his head but says nothing. Izzinius rejects a mad impulse to say nay himself and run shrieking from the room. "Well, then," Wilkes says, "it appears that we have a unanimous—"
"You didn't call for abstentions," Sykes says. "Abstentions!" Hollowaite screams. "All right," Wilkes says, nodding. "Abstentions." Sykes, Hollowaite, and Hollowaite's companion say abstain in unison, sounding vaguely like frogs.
"Well, then," Wilkes says, "the motion has been carried by a vote of four to nothing with three abstentions. The chairman votes present. It is therewith, I mean, herefore resolved that Izzinius Fox will now—"
"Wait a minute," Sykes says, gesticulating violently toward Wilkes. "Just wait a minute. How can you vote present when we're forced to abstain? That's totally unfair."
"Chairman's prerogative on a vote in which he may have an interest is to vote present, the least level of commitment."
"Where'd you read that?" Hollowaite says, standing. "There's no such rule. You've either got to abstain or commit yourself to a position; you can't just vote present. What's to prevent us from voting present? What's to prevent the entire organization from crumbling with present votes? I demand that you vote and I want that to show up in the minutes."
"There are no minutes," Wilkes says. "We don't have a secretary. Do you remember?"
"None of your insults, Wilkes! I'll have you know that I received a very interesting phone call from Miles Graffa-natis not three hours before I left to come to this meeting and Miles Graffanatis had a very interesting proposal to make about what my position might be in the Plutonians. Miles Graffanatis tends to think that I've been ignored in this organization, that I haven't received the position due my abilities and he'd like to change that. Of course I loyally said no and intend to have nothing more to do with him, but you are making things difficult for me, Wilkes, you are making things very, very difficult! The history of abuses in this organization is clearly documented and—"
But Hollowaite can be heard no more. His remark about
Graffanatis has apparently created something of a sensation and now several people are trying to obtain the floor simultaneously, Sykes screaming loudest of all and finally obtaining silence by simple exercise of volume.
Izzinius finds himself shuddering with the sound, unconsciously putting his hands to his ear, and Susan leans over and whispers, "It doesn't matter. Don't worry about a thing. It's just procedural. You'll have the floor in just five or ten minutes; you have to let them get their energy out this way so that they'll be able to listen to you. You want to be listened to, don't you?"
Fox manages to nod, then shakes his head and says, "I don't think it's going to work. I just can't see how I could possibly talk to them. They don't really listen."
"Oh yes they do," Susan says. "The trouble with you, Izzinius, is that you come into something strange and right away you start to make value judgments. You'd be better off if you just respected people and their common sense and came to understand that there are certain ways of doing things. Now be patient." Fox shakes his head and tries to say something but the overwhelming bellow of Sykes's voice finally cancels the possibility of all conversation.
"I just want to know!" Sykes is screaming, "I just want to know how many other people in this room are agents of Miles Graffanatisl How many of you are not members of the Solarians at all but traitorous, treacherous invaders; South Bronx vermin come here to subvert our purposes, steal our confidences, and report everything to your infamous leader? How many! Who will tell the truth? Where does Izzinius Fox come from?"
Fox gets to his feet, waves frantically and shouts to the limit of his volume in an effort that leaves him weak and gasping. "I'M NOT A FAN, GODDAMNIT. I'M A COLLECTOR AND I NEVER HEARD OF MILES GRAFFANATIS IN MY LIFE!"
He sits down feeling that at last he has done something devastating, but, in the dead silence that follows his outburst, Sykes says quietly, "Someone will be able to explain why the young man is so defensive!"
And the meeting, at that point, becomes chaotic. What happens is that Fox quite loses control of his perception.
His vision dances, hearing becomes erratic, concentration fails and he seems to be in a space surrounded only by vaguely gesturing forms, capering, screaming, dancing, parading. They are saying things to one another like "Nep-tunians!" and "Ugly traitors!" and "Infantile swine!" and "Graffanatis is the revolution!" And for the life of him it is all too much. It seems to all be slipping away. He is not only unable to deal with it (which would be the least of it), but a massive apathy which seems to sink leadenly through his limbs and joints makes him unwilling to. There is a certain failure of concern, in short, and Fox does not care anymore. He knows that this is dangerous symptomatology. A man in his condition, what with the fate of Earth at stake and the Rhelm people having to be fought off by the minute, a man in that kind of fix certainly should not abandon his sensibilities. But nevertheless he is tired, tired, and the slow dissolution of mood and scene which he contemplates seems to be not only the inevitable outcome of what has been happening to him but somehow the deserved one as well. He deserves it. He has worked too hard.
Somewhere in the distance he feels Susan pressing against him with increased urgency. Stuart is shouting something about fandom and fanac and gaffiation and neofans and bee enn effs. Wilkes is talking to him as well, soothingly and at length, but he hears nothing. If Graffanatis himself were to walk into the room at this point he knows that he would greet the villain only with a small bland style.
He feels himself being separated from his seat and then escorted through a web of space. He has a feeling of transition, flight, but it is all narrow, detached, happening to someone of whom he has never heard and the giggles and moans he hears could, for all they matter to him, be his own. In fact they are his own, but only on the elevator, moving unevenly downward, does he become aware of this and then too it does not seem to matter. Susan and Stuart talk to him soothingly, carefully, at great length, trying to patiently sort out things for them and he listens with mild appreciation, considerate for their time and trouble. But if he was, at this moment, quite able to talk he would tell them that it is perfectly all right; he can manage without them, everything is fine. Like Graffanatis, he is in some space of his own, cemented to his own purpose, a fish in speckled water flicking brightly toward the canal as the ponderous and mindless sea scurries above him, befouling the surface with its own absent pollution.
When he begins to feel like himself again he is sitting in a cafeteria—Stuart on his right, Susan across from him—and he is drinking a cup of coffee. Susan, meanwhile, is talking to him patiently, quietly, with gentle gestures: she has apparently been talking for some time and at the look of returning intelligence in his eyes she smiles but does not stop. She is telling him now—has been telling him for some time it appears—the history of the Graffanatis Imbroglio and he listens as carefully as he can while Stuart holds his wrist casually and looks down dully at his coffee cup.
"So Miles said when Sykes said that, he said, 'I can no longer exist in an organization which will not make the simplest commitment to basic realities!' And he stood up and said that everyone who agreed with him should join with him in walking out now. Well,' it was a sensation of course, there was no question about that, but everybody was so stunned for a moment that no one moved. And Miles said, 'I can see that whatever courage remains in this blasted organization is limited only to me,' and went to the door. That was when they began to follow him. First Johnny Bernstein and then Hugh Bellows and Mark Julius and finally Gail Curtis went out with him; and Teddy didn't know what to do. I mean, it was a terrible thing to accuse a man of disloyalty and end by being ultimately disloyal to yourself, but Teddy put it to a vote and it was agreed that Miles had absolutely no right to do what he did and that the whole thing was terribly immature. It was really a solid vote of confidence in Teddy and the Solarians. But I guess," Susan finishes glumly, "I guess he's picked up, Miles I mean, I guess he's picked up a little support since then. I wouldn't be surprised if Sykes, Hollowaite, and that tall goon in the corner were all spies for Graffanatis. He's got the whole organization by the throat. So anyway, that kind of explains what happened tonight."
"They didn't listen to me, Susan," Fox says. "I was supposed to talk to them about what was happening to me; you said that this would be the solution to the whole situation and they wouldn't even listen."
"That's not quite the point," she says, rather sharply. "I mean, that's all well and good, Izzinius, and we're all sympathetic; but do you know what we've witnessed tonight? We've witnessed nothing less than the destruction and possible death of the Solarians."
"Which," Stuart says, "might be a damned good thing, all considered."
"Oh, you can't really say that, Stuart. Think of the contribution the Solarians have made over the past four years. The dedication. The involvement. And now it's all gone because Miles Graffanatis is a power-hungry lunatic. It's a sad, sad thing."
"I don't understand this," Fox finds himself saying. "I mean, I simply don't understand this. I never meant to know people like that. It's all so strange…"
"What's also sad," Stuart says, ponderously, "is that Miles is not the only one to blame; Teddy Wilkes's own power drives have to be held to blame for a good deal of the difficulties we've seen. The trouble with Teddy is that he simply can't deal with people."
"Oh, sometimes," Susan says, "sometimes he can. But the thing is that the Plutonians have nothing to offer. They're just a splinter group in the first place and in the second they're just into sword-and-sorcery; they aren't science-fiction fans at all. They're fantasists. I don't quite know what's happened to us."
"Listen," Fox says, his feeling of disorientation gone but some disconnection setting in to take its place, "listen, maybe we should just forget the whole thing. I mean, I feel like going home and going to bed or something. Maybe in the morning things will look better."
"Oh nonsense, Izzinius," Susan says. "You're always so defensive about things and so careful about your health; you'd never be in this mess if you weren't so selfish in the first place. You know what I think we ought to do? I see only one solution."
"Don't tell me about Miles Graffanatis," Stuart says.
"That's exactly what I'm thinking about. I think that we all ought to go up to Miles. Izzie and you and me. We ought to talk to him. Maybe he can see the light of day. Maybe we can lead him to understand that the future of the Solarians is more important than the ambitions of any single person and that all of us have to make compromises. I agree that he should have been president. Teddy had been president for three months already—two whole terms; it was time for a change. He was greedy. But none of us understood how badly Miles wanted the presidency and he didn't understand that his time would have come anyway."
"Well, listen," Izzinius says, with a certain false briskness, draining his cup of coffee and pushing his chair back from the table. "Listen, that's all well and good. Why don't you just do that, Susan and Stuart, and I'll be getting along home. You can tell me—"
"Nonsense," Susan says and seizes his wrist. "That's nonsense, Izzy. You've got to go along with us. You've got to go up and tell Miles what you were going to tell the Solarians. It's the only way to shock him into an awareness of how serious things are. If he can understand that it was completely his fault that the Solarians were unable to listen to your story, if he is led to understand that it was his spies planted in there who broke up the meeting and deprived them of your revelation, he may come to his senses. It isn't that Miles isn't sensible when he wants to be, just that he doesn't like to think."
"Yeah," Stuart says. "What was that anyway that you wanted to talk about to them, Izzie? I was very interested; I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to hear."
"Nothing much," Fox says.
"He's being visited by some aliens," Susan says, "or more properly, the aliens are making him visit. They're in orbit outside the Earth and they keep on taking Izzie up to the spaceship to demand that he turn over evidence to them that will allow them to take over the Earth. They seem to want the Cupboard articles on the engineering of modern minds and they keep on seizing his consciousness and they won't let him go."
"You don't say?" Stuart says. "That's very interesting. That's one I never heard of before. Must be very tough for you, hey, Izzie? Aliens! Seizing your mind! Imagine that."
"It's pretty tough," Fox says. "There's no question about it."
"He's bearing up very well," Susan says. "But he needs help and I thought that the Solarians could give it to him. It's to our eternal discredit that we were unable to hear Izzie speak tonight. Now the thing to do is to go right up to Miles Graffanatis and tell him what happened and make him listen to Izzie. That should bring him back to his senses, when he understands how important the issues are here and how the stakes are too high for this kind of immaturity. I think that he'll listen to reason."
"Sykes will probably be there already," Stuart says. "And that other one."
"Well, of course they'll be there, but they wouldn't tell Miles the truth. They'll just glamorize themselves. It isn't that Miles won't listen to reason if we give it to him."
"Look," Fox says, "look, I really don't feel very well; I'm quite tired and I think I have to go home. You can tell Graffanatis, I mean you can say to him what I would have said. Wouldn't it accomplish the same thing?"
Stuart shakes his head, and Susan says, "Never. He'd think that we were faking it or something because all that he'll hear from Sykes and Hollowaite will be lies. We have to confront him with the truth."
"Don't you want to help spread the truth, Izzie?" Stuart says. "Think of the consequences involved. Besides, I know I'd appreciate your cooperation. I just got a January 1947 Tremendous in and I think that I can sell it to you for half price. You need that one, right?"
"Stuart," Susan says, "must you always try to do business with people every second? Can't you sometimes just be friends with them? Besides, I've told Izzie already, I don't think that he should collect anymore magazines; I think that that's one of the reasons he got into all this trouble in the first place. The collecting. If you had guided him the right way—"
"January 1947?" Fox says. "The January 1947 Tremendous?"
"In mint condition. Not even a bent flap. One of the most beautiful copies of this issue I've ever seen and right now I can tell you that it's going to be a rare one. The market is piling in on those. I can give it to you for two dollars or maybe a dollar seventy-five. How would that be?"
"That's the one with the Marlow cover, isn't it? The two fairies fighting inside the spaceship with the green ointment coming down from the ceiling and all those Druids watching? And the moon and rings of Saturn in the background?"
"That's the one," Stuart says with satisfaction. "It was Marlow's third and last cover for Tremendous, and most of us agree that it was the best. And it's got the new Vivaldi serial starting off in that one too."
"No it doesn't," Fox says. "The Vivaldi serial, Killers of the Rulers starts in the December 1946 issue and I know that because I have it. The second installment is in the January 1947 and then it finishes off in the February 1947. The December 1946 issue is the rare one, you know. That's the one that they're after."
"Well, I don't blame them," Stuart says. "It's a little beauty and the Oliver cover is striking. One of Oliver's best."
"No, I don't mean for that. That's the issue with Cupboard's articles in it."
"Oh yeah? Oh, of course, you're right. That's right. Well, in the last analysis, it's all a matter of taste. You like Cupboard, I like Oliver. And Steele. What a terrific magazine that late 1940 Tremendous was."
"Stuart," Susan says, "you're not even interested in science fiction. You don't even read those magazines. All that you do is try to profiteer off people like Izzie who don't even know what's going on. I think it's disgusting."
"I love the magazines," Stuart says. "How could I be in this business if I didn't love them? You have no right to say that, Susan. The only thing is I can't be a collector because it takes guts to really give yourself over to something and admit that it's important to you. I don't have that kind of guts. That's why I admire Izzie so much; he comes right out and has conviction and that's something which very few of us have."
"No, that isn't true, Stuart," Susan says, "but we can't waste time talking about that now. I think it's just disgusting how you make people get involved with collections and all the time laugh at them. But we'll talk about that later. Right now, Izzie, I want to get up and go to Miles. I have a feeling that he's waiting for us. We'll tell him the whole story and Izzie will tell him what's going on and we'll settle this one right now, for once and for all. That's the whole thing."
She puts down her coffee cup with a clatter and stands, looking quite domineering. "Come on," she says, "let's go." Fox, feeling that he is somehow attached to her by a thin but cutting wire, stands up, and Stuart does as well. Fox puts on his coat mumbling something to the effect that he really does not care to go but he knows that the issue is settled. Susan's determination is really quite frightening and, in -the bargain, he has two other motives. One is that he might as well talk to Graffanatis who, it seems, might be the only person who could truly understand and help him—at least he finds that he is now beginning to think in that way—and the other is that he really wants that January 1947 Tremendous and if going over to Graffanatis will be helpful in getting Stuart to lower his price, then it is well worth the undertaking.
It is time to bring things to a conclusion one way or the other; Fox can see that. "All right," he says, "all right, I'll go, I'll go." But they are already striding ahead of him briskly and he finds that instead of being greeted as the enormous concession which it surely is, to the contrary, his statement has become a desperate plea and, scuttling after them through the cafeteria after colliding with an old woman and a tray, Fox finds that he has to scream it, reiterate it, plead it through whistling lips as he strives to catch up with them before they go out the swinging doors. But before he can make it, guess who picks him up again? And drags him winging through unlimited stripes and banners of space. Scuttling in helpless submission, he permits the warp to take him where it will thinking: there must be a better way to do this, surely" there must be an easier way to work out this scheme; but just as determined as ever that he will tell them nothing because the fate of the world remains at stake and in any event he has to talk first to Miles Graffanatis.
"Well," the Arch-Leader says, "how are you feeling?" This time they are alone again in the closeted humming whine of the main room. "You look very tired."
"I'm all right," Fox says. "I've had a difficult evening. I really couldn't bear to be tortured again just now, I might break down on you and then where would you be?" He feels almost flippant at the moment; there is one thing that can be said about the Solarians and that is this: when you have gone through one of their meetings you have, in a genuine sense, been prepared to see it all. There is very little that the aliens can do to him at this moment that he feels he has not already experienced, at least by proxy. "You still do want the articles, don't you?"
"Oh indeed," the Arch-Leader says. "Unfortunately, however, we've run into a little bit of a problem. Nothing serious but complicating. I wouldn't worry about it at all but it does make things difficult. Headquarters feels that we should release you."
"Really?"
"They feel that since our contacts have been unavailing it would be unwise to pursue this further; that what we obtain over resistance could be more dangerous than obtaining nothing at all. They want to dissolve the mission in fact and recall us; send out another expedition to take over. With someone else," the Arch-Leader says hastily. "I mean, they would try to deal with another human, you wouldn't be touched again."
"Well," Fox says, struggling to a sitting position and finding, by some happenstance, a steaming cup of coffee on his right which the alien motions him to drink. "Well, that's remarkable news. I mean, it solves everybody's problem, doesn't it? You can go home and I can live out my life in peace and nobody's unhappy because the decision has been made for us."
"Well, not quite," the creature says. "I have, of course, intergrammed back a reply of the utmost protest and I do believe that I have a good chance of winning my point since the commander on the spot has ultimate authority on the nature of the conditions, at least he can give the only informed opinion. I think that things are going along quite satisfactorily at this juncture and that it is only a matter of a little bit of time now until we reach a complete, er, meeting of the minds. On the other hand, Headquarters is participating in its usual obstructory course for the usual reasons. The point is that we cannot continue our treatment for the moment, all our activities are suspended by fiat until the debate is resolved. So you've just come along this time for the ride, so to speak, just to be reminded that we're very much in contact and still have our hand in. You note, of course, that the frequency of your visits is increasingly marked. That is all part of the procedure; eventually you would be visiting us ten to twelve times a day and at that time resistance seems to crumble entirely, usually by that tack alone. But I'm afraid that our procedure is such that we cannot continue treatment while a policy decision is being made. So there you are. Terribly sorry of course."
"Oh, of course," Fox says and drinks the coffee which is pleasantly bitter, even acrid—all in all far superior to what he has had in the cafeteria and far more revivifying. After all of the events of the evening, now superseded by this moment of peace he finds himself in a peculiar state which he imagines is very close to drunkenness (he has no way of being quite sure since he has never had a drink in his life). "But I guess you'll get through it. I've had quite an evening myself."
"Well, you see," the alien says in almost a friendly tone, "you're going through the same kind of thing that we're going through here; the interesting thing about sentient races is that they all conform to certain basic patterns of behavior and bureaucracy, which, for all the apparent dif-fusion of the races, tend to run remarkably parallel. In my case we have a Headquarters which is attempting to build up its appropriations from the government—oh yes, we run on governmental appropriations like everything else—and the best way that they can do this of course is to have increased missions, increased responsibilities, increased duplication for various tasks and so on and so forth. Now, you see, by calling our mission abandoned and sending a second expedition to do the same job they'll be able to double their appropriations for the effort and this will give them all kinds of sock in the central office. You do follow what I'm talking about, of course?"
"I think so," Fox says. "I used to work for the government myself. Our government, that is. The Department of Relief and Restoration."
"Well," the Arch-Leader says with an enormous sigh, "you know the way it is, bureaucracy is bureaucracy and so on and so forth and what they want to do is to send two for the price of two. But I don't mind saying that I'll fight until the last inch. My judgment will prevail and we'll finish the job."
"Well," Fox says, "I wish you luck. I mean, I can understand your position."
"That's very kind of you, inasmuch as after all you stand to pay the penalty if we're allowed to continue here. Very generous, if I may say so. You see, Izzinius, it's nothing personal here at all. We have only the kindliest feelings toward you. We just want to finish our job and get out. But I must say that your resistance has been admirable. I mean, one can respect a man who will defend his home species in the way that you have. Of course you understand that they're really not worth it and that the benefits will be incalculable after you submit. Otherwise, your race won't survive another fifty of your years. I don't see how you can do it."
"Well, you know," Fox says, uncrossing his legs and leaning back, feeling quite relaxed, the thing is that the Arch-Leader is the first fully reasonable creature with whom he seems to have dealt within the last few hours, "you know how it is. I mean there are no easy answers and so on. Actually, I don't think that things are that bad here but I can see where my opinion might be a little bit prejudiced.
We're getting along. Of course life hasn't been all that it could have for me but I have hopes."
"Yes, I can understand that," the Arch-Leader says politely. "Would you like more coffee? No? Well, anyway, the thing is that there are forces already set in motion, which are not quite visible yet, and whose consequences will not be visible for twenty years, but which are already built deeply into the system on your planet. This can only have one outcome, a rather grim one, I must say. You people are really doing dreadful things to your environment you know, but, beyond that, this so-called technological explosion you're having down there has had the most disruptive effect on the lives of most people. More and more they find themselves totally disconnected from any sense of their acts, any sense of consequence and also any ability to influence their lives. They really can't get hold of their lives, you know, that's quite a major problem. Eventually that, along with overpopulation and the media that will allow you to see more and more of how the others live, will lead to the implantation of a dreadful rage in most of your people, a rage which seems to have no cause and no outlet but which must be channeled in some way. And the only way in which that rage will find direction, I am sorry to say, is in destruction. They'll try to strike out at the environment and at the technology which they dimly sense to be the root of the problem. But almost everything that they do will be intercepted, so to speak, by the others: other people that is, who get in the way. Oh, it will be dreadful, Fox! The riots, the famines, the pestilence, the murder, the strikes, the dislocation, the aimlessness, the slow topple and heave of civilization—and the question of atomic energy too, of course. And all of the loneliness and lost purposes and wastel Really, Fox, you ought to think twice about this whole thing! Do you really want to sentence your people to live in this fashion when a simple decision of yours could make a better life for all mankind? Of course not."
"In other words," Fox says, stricken by an interesting idea, "in other words, you're trying to say that all of life for everyone all the time will be like a Solarians' meeting. Is that right?"
"That's about right," the Arch-Leader says. "I mean, more
or less. These *Solarian' meetings—and I admit, I can hardly understand what is on you people's minds, I have never witnessed anything quite like that before and, as a matter of fact, had to tune it out from disgust after a time—these 'Solarian' meetings are quite restricted, the purposes are narrow; there is, if I might say so, only a single passion at the center whose resolution is the question at issue. There is also a consensus in that most of those there have agreed, it would seem, to disagree. But the situation which I am promising you is one of such magnitude and resources that it would be like a Solarians' meeting held in one of your oceans on a freezing dark night with everyone blindfolded and your 'moon' exerting a high tide, everyone struggling in viscosity, hating one another, trying to touch mostly for the purposes of destruction. Terrible stuff, Fox! Come now, why don't you simply turn over the transcripts?"
It is tempting and for only a moment Izzinius allows himself to consider this: for one thing, it would send the aliens away and, for another, it would stop the sudden visits and, for a third, it would help the Arch-Leader to protect his position and even win a promotion. Truly he wishes the creature no harm; he wishes that everyone was as reasonable as the Arch-Leader obviously wants to be. If he were to rum over the transcripts he would, in short, be helping a friend and getting himself out of a very difficult spot and this would unquestionably be a benefit. Also, if what the Arch-Leader contends is true, he would not only not be the betrayer of mankind but would indeed be responsible for its salvation since things as bad as what the creature predicts would certainly be unbearable for Izzinius Fox let alone the rest of humanity.
He tumbles all these thoughts through his mind for a moment and allows himself to consider the whole thing in all of its proportions, and finally shakes his head, biting his lips and says, "No. I can't do it. I'm sorry, you understand. There's nothing personal to this at all but I just can't."
"But listen," the Arch-Leader says, "if what I told you comes to pass, why then—"
"I know. I know what you're saying and I really understand and appreciate it. But you see, the thing is, I can't believe it. I can't believe that things are going to get that terrible and I'm afraid that you're just saying it to me to scare me into doing something which would be against the interests of the planet. Look, there's a lot of hope. We're not doing too badly in the war and it's the only war we've had for quite a few years and most people are living better than they ever did before and generally speaking people seem to be getting a bit brighter. I mean, I agree that there are probably some terrible things going on in Russia that we don't even know about, and Hitler was despicable and all that, but that was a kind of period the world had to live through and I think we've all learned from it. I mean, this war isn't as big as the last two in any way and it seems to be confined to a particular area with only a limited group of people fighting it and it isn't spreading. Isn't that something? And there's less poverty and need and people seem to be acting a little kinder to one another. No, I just don't think that it's going to turn out the way you say it is. It couldn't be quite that bad. We're not insane, after all, and we'd have to be insane to turn out the way you say we are."
"You'd be surprised," the Arch-Leader says with a sigh and then comes to his full height. "Oh well, I suppose that you can't have everything. It would have been nice if I had been able to coax you into reason and deliver the transcripts to Headquarters; very nice and reasonable. But life is very hard, very difficult and defeating; there is no reason to expect easy answers. I wish that you could be led to understand, Izzinius, that your heroism is irrelevant."
"Everything is relevant," Fox says. "For heaven's sajke, you know that, don't you?"
"I'm truly sorry we had to torture you in the way we did but you understand that orders are orders. We are not unfeeling creatures, you realize; we suffer. Knowing that we caused you such anguish was very difficult for me and I want you to know that several of the crew protested on your behalf. You are not without your admirers here, Izzinius; I want you to know that."
"Oh that's all right. Looking back on it, I don't remember him ever taking me to the roller derby anyway, so the whole thing was made up and that's not too bad."
"Of course it's all made up!" the Arch-Leader says. "That's precisely the point, Izzinius. There is nothing worse than the imaginary past… unless, of course, it is the foreseeable future. I am afraid our time is about up. Would you like some more coffee?"
"No, thank you," Fox says courteously. "I've had quite a bit today already and I don't want to get caffeine nerves. And I'm smoking too much in the bargain."
"Just inquiring. We'll see you soon and I do hope that we'll be able to resolve this shortly. I'm sure that this little problem with Headquarters will work out for the best and then we'll simply be proceeding."
"Oh, I trust so," Fox says and feels the familiar pressure of unwinding, the imminence of passage. "Well, thank you very much for your time and trouble and frankness."
"Well, thank you, Izzinius," the Arch-Leader says. And through the clouds of his diffusion they wave at one another, a courtesy and cheerfulness of spirit quite enormous in this void. All the way back to Earth Izzinius finds himself tapping his foot and humming, not that it is a long trip of course or that his voice is very good or that he has ever had even an inadequate sense of rhythm.
He catches up with Susan and Stuart on the sidewalk outside, virtually staggering into them. Stuart seizes him in an enormous grasping clutch and, looking at him, says, "You weren't trying to get away from us were you now, Izzy? That wouldn't be right, after we worked this whole thing out and like that."
"No he wasn't," Susan says sharply. "Really, Stuart, leave him go. Can't you see he's been on a trip?"
"A what?"
"He's been with his Rhelm people again. I've seen him come back twice already today. He gets a certain look on his face and his breathing gets labored. Look at him, he's gasping like a fish. That's the sign."
"Well," Stuart says, "well, Izzy, is that true? You were with those aliens of yours."
Fox nods and says, "I don't want to talk about it now. Could we just kind of leave it to the side?"
"He's very sensitive about this," Susan says. "It's kind of a sore point with him. You just kind of leave him alone after he comes back for a while and then he's okay."
"Is that so?" Stuart says. "You're right, his face looks exactly like a fish. So they really take you on a trip, eh, Izzie? That must be very interesting."
Feeling vaguely as if he were little more than an object being discussed at some random distance and to no effect, Fox says, "Listen, just forget the whole thing, will you? I think I'd like to go home now. We can discuss it tomorrow or something."
"Nonsense," Susan says and puts her hand on his sleeve, guides him into a subway kiosk; Stuart's weight nudges him gently from behind as they negotiate the stairs with some difficulty and go through the turnstiles. "That's nonsense, Izzinius, there's only one way that we can bring this thing to an end and give you the help you need and that's to see Miles Graffanatis." There are dim rumbles, tremors in the distance, filth on the platform seems to circulate in response. Stuart says with satisfaction, "Here's the train coming in right now. It's only a short ride."
"But why?" Fox says, still in Susan's hands, feeling her palm, as a matter of fact, begin to move up and down his sleeve with real enthusiasm. She leans against him and puts her face into his shoulder, a peculiar gesture under the circumstances since, whatever else there has been between him and Susan, it is nothing which he has equated with a physical bond. "Why is this so important? He can't help me. I'm sorry I mentioned this business in the first place," he adds pointlessly. "I should have kept it all to myself."
"Not at all," Stuart says and motions that they should stand back as, screaming hideously, the train staggers across their path of vision and halts with a groan. "What's the point of living if you don't have good friends you can confide in, people who can share your problems, people who can help you work out things?" Susan nods and they encircle him, push into the train.
He finds himself seated uncomfortably in an almost empty car between Susan and Stuart who thrust their knees into him, exchange glances over his head, seem to share a kind of feral knowledge as the train slips out of the station. Across from him, a young boy, no more than eight or nine, is sitting in silent intensity, gripping an issue of Thoughtful and reading it with such application that sweat seems to be coming out on his forehead. The magazine trembles in his hand, pages slip and clutter, and then the magazine falls to the floor. The boy scrambles to pick it up and then, crouching, looks up at them, sees Stuart, nods at him in a stricken way and then, folding the magazine under his armpit leaves the car rapidly, slamming the door up front as he passes into the next.
"I think I know him," Stuart says. "He's a fan from Brooklyn named Arthur Abbotson. I sold him that issue of Thoughtful just two days ago if I don't miss my guess."
"Then why did he run away from us?" Fox asks. Stuart considers this for a moment, tilting his head back and closing his eyes, then leans forward shaking his head, opens his eyes to fullest width and says, "I don't know. A lot of people I meet in the store don't seem to want to have social contact on the outside. I can't really figure it. Maybe they're ashamed of what they're doing or some such."
"They aren't aware of fandom," Susan says. "If they knew there was such a thing as fandom they wouldn't feel so isolated or lonely or ashamed of themselves, and they'd find that they could enjoy it. That's been your tragedy, Izzinius, you stayed away from fandom too long. If you had listened to me weeks ago, none of this would ever have happened."
"None of what?"
"Well, you would have come to the Solarians while Miles was still there and you would have told everybody about this and Miles would have been so interested in what was going on and so taken with his responsibilities as a member to solve it that he never would have walked out to form the Plutonians. It would be a whole different situation. Frankly, Izzie, you've shown very little consideration for your friends here; you've been very selfish and in a way this whole thing is your fault."
"Yes," Stuart grunts vaguely, bobbing to his left, "yes, Izzie, she's got a point there. If you have trouble in science fiction you should go right away to your science-fiction friends to help you."
"But it wasn't science fiction," Fox points out.
There is silence for a moment, then Susan says, "Well, of course it's science fiction, Izzinius. Doesn't what's been happening to you sound exactly like science fiction? Anyway, it never would have happened to you at all if you hadn't gotten so absorbed in those silly magazines and lived to yourself and let them take over your mind. You know that's true, don't you?"
Whether or not it is true, this seems to be quite unanswerable. There is really very little to say. Fox begins to understand dimly that there is nothing he can say anymore that will make the slightest bit of difference and so, in the silence that follows Susan's remark, he succumbs again to a kind of disassociation, seeming to witness him-self and his companions from a far, blank distance as the train agonizes its way through the tunnels, moaning faintly to itself on the turns. For a moment he feels that the disassociation may be the normal prelude to a seizure, but nothing happens and he comes to understand that the Arch-Leader is probably still waiting out his instructions; for the moment he has been left to his own devices.
As a matter of fact, he may be left permanently to his own devices; if the expedition is recalled to the home planet he assumes that this will be accomplished quickly and, all that sentiment to one side, he doubts very much if the Arch-Leader will find it necessary to summon him for a personal farewell. In the ultimate sense they have only been doing business together, nothing else, there is no reason why he should feel that he and the Arch-Leader have a relationship. One knows that this persistent desire of his to involve himself emotionally with people with whom he is merely contracting business should be carefully watched, and could, if left unchecked, lead to a very embarrassing kind of destruction. Nevertheless, he finds himself thinking the Arch-Leader is really not that bad a type: a little harassed, a little rigid, more than a little mechanical, but considering the branch of the civil service in which he is employed and the particular problems of alienation involved in any government work, the creature is not a bad sort at all, quite reasonable really; certainly far more reasonable than most of the civil service types with which Fox himself worked during his period of employment. Everything is relative after all, and if there is any malevolence in the air it seems to have come from the "Headquarters" rather than from the Arch-Leader himself, who, as has already been pointed out, simply wants to get a more stable level of position. Perhaps the creature is still awaiting official certification and needs to make the mission succeed in order to escape provisional status. This would certainly explain a lot.
He toys then, not entirely for the first time, with the idea of turning over, when all is said and done, the Cupboard transcripts to the Arch-Leader. There would be very little to it and Stuart would almost certainly (for a price) be able to replace the rare issue for him. Certainly, if things are heading to as disastrous a pass here on Earth as the
Arch-Leader had suggested, then it would be the better part of martyrdom to turn the damned planet over to the kind of galactic union which might be able to run it sensibly. The fact that Fox himself does not think that things are that bad is not a conclusive judgment; he is not an expert after all and the aliens are far more experienced than him at cultural judgments. The fact is that they may be entirely right in what they are saying, in which case his discretion (turnover) would be the better part of valor (defiance). He has, in short, taken what he imagines to be a stand for humanity against the brutal and insensitive invaders, but almost everything that he has seen recently has been to reopen the question. Who is humane? Who is brutal? Certainly, the aliens seem to be far more rational than any of the humans with whom he has been dealing. The aliens at least know what they want and seem to have a clear and evident sense of purpose.
He is unable, in any event, to understand yet what there is precisely to this Cupboard article which would make it so desirable—indeed so pivotal—to the alien's sense of purpose. Izzinius is not quite sure of what Cupboard was suggesting. He was barely able to read the article; it was surrounded fore and aft by a long editorial, by K. M. Conrad, saying that it was the greatest blessing to humanity since the coming of segregation and the Christian era, which at times became so hysterical (an old tendency of Conrad's) as to be incomprehensible. And the article itself was terribly dull and seemed to lack Cupboard's usual stylistic precision, which he had shown to such advantage in his famous serials Into the Altair Cluster and Clashing Rocket-ships Play Sterile War in the Glancing Void.
Cupboard's theory was that the human brain could be schematized into four compartments named A, B, C and D, and that each of the compartments had a particular role to play in the development and activity of the person. A was the sexual part; B was the rational part; C was the punishment part; and D was the retribution part. The healthy adult was mostly controlled by C which kept his raging impulses in check and allowed B to make its modest contribution to his overall insight. But a person could, at any time in his prenatal or infant life, be "fired" by something which Cupboard called a "quadroon," which would tend to augment or reduce the power of any given area and thus force the individual to run "out of kilter." Quadroons resulted from "faulty input of emotional stimuli" and guaranteed in turn that there would be a "faulty output because of poor engineering."
What Cupboard had suggested was a method of engineering the human brain and development so that quadroons did not occur and the brain was thus able to stay in perfect balance. Specifically, Cupboard had recommended that the C area be built up by prenatal dialogues which the mother would hold with the unborn infant; she would advise the embryo to "always do the right thing" and "keep tight control" and so on and so forth while at the same time she would keep the A compartment in check, for instance, by saying that "sex is bad" or "sex is dreadful" or "sex is something you must be careful about"; the whole thing then was that humanity could be shaped into a perfect engineering model through the input of good quadroons instead of poor ones.
Ultimately, Cupboard predicted, there would be a quad-roonless society in which human beings, raised out of the womb, would be brought up in laboratories where they could be measured electronically and the input could be carefully controlled at all levels. But the inefficiency of modern science being what it was, Cupboard had added that the quadroonless society would only be accomplished when there had come to maturity a group of individuals with good quadroons and, hence, the ability to act rationally. This, in his opinion, would take forty years or a little less depending upon the distribution of the hardcover book based upon his article and the series of Q-Institutes whose foundation he announced and which were to begin their work all over the United States within a very few months with Cupboard himself as the sole proprietor.
It had struck Izzinius as being a shade simplistic or mechanical although, he could understand, looking into his own heart and mind (K. M. Conrad in his prologue to the article had advised readers to think or say NOTHING until they had examined the consequences of faulty quadroons in their own livesl), that he was suffering to some degree from faulty quadroons himself. In his case the C factor seemed to have entirely too much dominance over the others while the B was almost totally nonexistent. He would have paid a lot more attention to the article for that reason if Cupboard had not made a particular point of saying that there was no such thing as having too dominant a C component and that most human beings by nature were totally held in thrall by B; thoughts of sex, licentiousness, prurience, copulation, breeding, perversity and so on occupying them almost all the timejmd making it impossible for them to function as rational individuals.
Indeed, the article had ended with the ringing declaration: "Destroy the B compartment! Destroy these weak, pusillanimous desires that prevent us as men of freedom from achieving our own ends! Grant us, O Lord, perfect adjustment, perfect peace, and the end of this haunting specter of sex forever!" following which K. M. Conrad had appended the second part of his editorial along with a note that reprints of the article could be obtained from the Quadroon Foundation—whose mailing address was similar to that of Tremendous and whose vice president and chief recording secretary was K. M. Conrad himself.
For these reasons, along with a certain indifference to the nonfiction in the magazines—it really was often quite dull and hardly "scientific" at all—Fox had not paid much further attention to the efforts of the Quadroon Foundation, although he had been vaguely aware through letters in the THUMBNAILS sections of Tremendous and advertisements occasionally seen in most of the magazine that the Foundation was doing a tremendous job, expanding by leaps and bounds, so to speak, under the guidance and supervision of its founder/leader, whose aim was to put a Quadroon Testing and Curative Center in every American city containing a population of more than five hundred and whose aim was already well launched thanks to the efforts of many science-fiction writers who had stopped writing in order to devote their full efforts to the Foundation itself.
In this way, Fox came to understand, Conrad had lost two of his most valuable and persistent contributors: V. V. Vivaldi, author of "Killers of the Rulers" and "The Race of the Barbarians Against the Engineers to Destroy Civilization as We Know It," and Gertrude S. McMariantyre, who in several short stories published in the Tremendous of the late 1940s had secured her reputation as the leading woman writer in science fiction—apart from Margaret Tut-tle, who, it was rumored, wrote all the stories of her more famous husband Roger Turtle under his pen name of Maurice Tuttle. Fox had managed to put the whole thing out of mind as only a minor loss (he had never liked Vivaldi or McMariantyre that much anyway), and had forgotten it almost completely until the aliens had raised the whole subject again.
But if Cupboard had indeed discovered the secret of human consciousness, the foundation of human worth, then certainly there had been something in the article and the foundation itself beyond his means of comprehension and perhaps he, Fox, had no idea to single-handedly make the decision to deny humanity these benefits. For a single awful moment the possibility occurs to him that the Arch-Leader might himself be a member of the foundation or at least working on retainer, but he then dismisses this out of hand; the foundation had made it very clear that-it was a totally nonprofit institution devoted to Human Worth and he could hardly see Cupboard turning it over to a group of aliens, for whatever purposes. The whole thing is very confusing and dark. At this moment Fox is not sure that were the aliens to summon him he would not sigh and stretch and say, "Look, the hell with it. I'll give it to you." It would bring a lot of things to an end and possibly save a difficult situation. However, he is not granted that choice. Instead, he feels Stuart's elbow in his ribs, Susan's hand against his heart and then he is lifted, perhaps the word is propelled, out of his seat.
"Our stop," Susan says and they lead him through the doors, through the station and up the stairs. He is now in something approaching a numb, unblinking state; it is really much easier to simply walk along with them than try to exert any control of the situation. So he only nods when Susan says, "Miles lives right here, right above the subway station; he believes that the noise conjures thought."
They go into an odorous small building, whose mailboxes seem to have been literally hammered through into the stone, and up one flight of stairs, kicking papers and shreds of orange peel before them. ("Miles believes in trying to live as the masses live; he says that this is the only way you can cultivate a sense of reality," Susan confides.)
Without knocking, they enter into an apartment, gloomily lit by a kerosene lamp, which contains in the living room only a table and a chair and behind which table and on which chair sits a huge man, perhaps four hundred pounds or more (it is difficult to tell in this light) who looks at them out of swollen eyes.
Tapping a cigarette gracefully on the table next to him, the fat man says, "So there you are. I knew you would come. I knew it would only be a matter of time. So this is our little doppelganger, eh?" he says, looking at Fox and Fox feels a thrill of loathing and terror go through him because in some trickery of this light Graffanatis looks exactly like the Arch-Leader only much larger and for all the aspect of the situation he could be back in the spaceship with the alien ready for his Final Interview. "Get out," he says to Susan and Stuart. Without a word they turn from Fox and are gone. He is left confronting Graffanatis in the empty room. It is one of the most difficult experiences of his life although, Fox suspects, it may have a good effect upon his C compartment.
"Sit down," Graffariatis says. Fox makes a gesture to indicate that he does not know where and Graffanatis barks. "On the floor, you idiot," while Fox scrambles for a place. "We have no time for amenities here," Graffanatis says. "The sooner we get our business finished, the better off we'll be."
"I suppose so," Fox says, just trying to make conversation. The fact is that he has been with Graffanatis for only thirty seconds or so and he is already convinced that he has never met anyone quite like this man in his life; waves of power seem to come off from the huge man in thick, uneven surges. Yet, for all his size, there is a curious delicacy in his gesture as he lifts a cigarette to his mouth, lights it and then inhales deeply, coughing.
"Sorry," Graffanatis says, "I'm a very heavy smoker as you see; I know that it's going to kill me along with the weight by the time I'm thirty or something like that but what the hell, you take your pleasure where you can and I wouldn't say I've had an excess of it. Well, Fox? Have you come to a decision?"
"Decision?" Fox says. "Decision about what? They brought me up here to talk to you and—"
"Nonsense," Graffanatis says. "I know exactly why they brought you up here and I know everything that's been going on. I tell you, Fox, we have no time for amenities here. I'm sorry to have thrown them out of the room so abruptly, but on the other hand they get exactly what they want and need. Types like Forsythe and Wiseman, alas, are to be manipulated. Sykes has given me a full report of your disgusting behavior at the Solarians."
"Disgusting behavior?" Fox says. "I didn't do anything. It all happened around me."
"Don't give me that nonsense," Graffanatis says, inhaling again and choking. "I told you, we have very little time for amenities here. You have to come to the point and stay at the point if you want to survive. Now you listen to me," he says. "Perhaps you'd better stand up, get to attention or something like that. I can see that you're one of those types who is thoroughly undisciplined, small passions and woes, odd obsessions circling in on you all the time, hence broken concentration. You're a sick man, Fox, do you know that? Your B compartment has run wild."
"B compartment?" Fox says, and is once again on the verge of a horrid insight. "Did you say B compartment?"
"Of course, what do you think, your C is in control? No, it's sad Fox, sad. You try to be reasonable with people, but they turn out time and again to be fundamentally insane. Quadroon therapy isn't fully applicable to the masses. Stand up you son of a bitch."
Shambling, rather stunned, Fox stands at a kind of loose attention before Graffanatis. Then, unwillingly under the fat man's glare, pulls himself into a posture of rigidity, his eyes flickering around the room. Unquestionably he is in a difficult situation; in fact, he has never experienced anything quite like this before. "I've never experienced anything quite like this before," he says.
"Well, of course you haven't; there's no reason why you should. You have been sequestered with your idiot magazines and your anal fixations too long, Fox; you can hardly be sensible. Look at me," Graffanatis says, putting out the cigarette and hacking phlegm through his nose with a practiced hand. "I said, look at me" Fox confronts the man's eyes, curiously white and rolling in his face, feels himself linked in, feels a sensation of falling, immersion. "Do you know who I am?" Graffanatis says. "Do you know who I am now?"
And Fox does. On the instant he knows who Graffanatis is, understands why he is in the room, begins to have some comprehension of what has happened to him now that it is far too late, of course, to change anything.
"I see you do," Graffanatis chuckles. "Well, Fox, it proves that even a collector can catch on. Do you know why you're here? Do you?"
"You want the article," Fox says weakly. "You want me to turn the article over to you."
"Oh, bullshit, Fox!" Graffanatis says with a somewhat effeminate gesture and then struggles, sneezing, for another cigarette. "If we wanted those, I mean if we need you for those you'd never even know that we were around. We've already got the article; we took it from your room while you were at the meeting. I would say that it's safely in Tom's hands by now and Tom's long gone."
"Tom?"
"The Arch-Leader. The one you think of as the Arch-Leader. Really a very nice fellow. A little bit weak on policies and has absolutely no understanding of science fiction, but really a sweet guy. No, that's all taken care of; we got that out."
"My December 1946 Tremendous?"
"No," Graffanatis says. "That was not necessary. We did not have to appropriate the whole issue; we merely ripped out the section containing the article. The cover is intact as is most of the rest of the table of contents."
"You mutilated it!"
"Well, that's the price you have to pay for involvement. It still has the cover, as I say."
"But that was a rare issue. I paid two dollars for that copy! You can't go in and steal property like that."
Graffanatis shakes his head despairingly and lights another cigarette, flicking the match against the wall. "You collectors," he says with loathing. "I mean, you people are really impossible. They told me about collectors when I got into fandom but I couldn't believe it. No, Fox, we don't need the transcripts from you; we've already got those. There is only one last thing to accomplish and then you can go on your way and we can go on ours. The article we no longer need, fortunately."
"Who's going to replace it? That's my property, you stole."
"I haven't the faintest idea," Graffanatis says. "It's none of my concern. Frankly, I think you'd be a lot better off, Fox, if you put away this whole question of collections and tried to get out into the world; tried to associate with people, lived a little bit. There's a whole lot more to science fiction than merely reading it you know. Speaking personally, I haven't read any science fiction for almost ten years. You keep up. You get filled in. It's not necessary to read these magazines much less have them. All you have to know is what's going on in them and it's always the same anyway." He tosses out the cigarette, grinds it into the rug and then reaches into his pack for another. Driblets of sweat run down his face and jowls; his eyes, shrouded by the fat, seem to look shrewdly through Fox, indeed, as if the interview has already been completed and there exists no purpose to him whatsoever.
"I really know I smoke too much," Graffanatis says. "I feel very guilty about it, to tell you the truth. It's an unpleasant habit and I find that I'm apologizing for it all the time. Nevertheless, it's just one of those few means of individual self-expression which I have within my ken. Tom and I have had numerous discussions about you, you know."
"Really?" Fox says. He would try to stand himself, but the room seems dense, enclosed by darkness. Also, to stand would lift the interview to a certain level he does not want to take yet. "That's quite interesting, I'm sure."
"Tom's a very nice fellow, you know. He's responsible for the whole fifth sector and he's done a bang-up job. Considering the kind of superiors he has, he's done simply remarkably."
"You know, Graffanatis," Fox says. "I really didn't think that you were a seditionist. You've betrayed the people of Earth, do you understand that? All the time that I was fighting in their defense you were acting toward their destruction. Don't you feel anything about that at all? Doesn't it mean a thing to you?"
"Oh my goodness," Graffanatis says and blows out a match, coughing, inserts the cigarette into his mouth with two hands and takes an enormous puff, exuding huge clouds of smoke behind which he can be seen only faintly for a while, shrouded by the density. "My goodness, Fox, you really have been reading science fiction too much; must you construe everything as this kind of megalomaniac engagement? I'm not a seditionist at all! I'm a savior!"
"Are you?"
"Well I should hope so," the huge man says. "I should certainly hope so. I mean in the first place are you really aware of the state that things have gotten into down here? There's no B compartment anywhere, everybody's dissipating like mad. That's the key to the whole thing, you know, people have lost any sense of effective self-control. And in the second place Cupboard has been a blessing. He's gotten a bad press and a lot of cruel misunderstanding, mostly because his ideas are actively dangerous to most of the people who run the world, but he's a great prophet, probably the only prophet since biblical times. Why, when I learned that he had finally reached his audience outside I felt such an enormous sense of relief that I knew I'd do everything within my power to advance the cause. Advance the cause, Fox! How many years do you think we have left on this planet?"
"I wanted to hold out. I thought it was important to stand in the breach. And all the time—"
"Well, that's a lot of nonsense, Fox. You don't even want to think about that. You're talking like all the rest of the Solarians; you have no sense of proportion or reality. When something truly important comes along you can't even understand it. Don't you know what's going on! Think about it, Fox! Licentiousness! Promiscuity! Breakdown! The destruction of society! The loss of all our values! Without control we have nothing and we've simply lost control." Graffanatis stubs out the cigarette choking and says, "Repression! Control! Discipline! We need a little bit of order in this world, Fox! Without order, we're all doomed! We've got to get away from the question of our base desires and discipline ourselves!"
Struggling to rise, Graffanatis seems to lose his balance, weaves, hangs onto the table desperately. Fox, out of some misguided sense of compassion, reaches across and helps the huge man to his feet, feeling the enormous dampness of the hands like paws clambering against his for grip. "Thank you," Graffantis says, gasping. "Thank you. Cupboard was right! We must control ourselves! We must lock ourselves away from evil thoughts! We must develop agencies capable of ordering and suppressing all of the evil within us! That is what is necessary! And now it will be done! Fox, will you hand me one of those cigarettes on the table, I seem to have run out of reach. I really am embarrassed about my smoking habit but you know everybody dies sometime anyway, so you might as well die doing something that interests you rather than kowtowing to other men. Thank you. Would you light it please? The matches are right over there. Thank you. Ah. Thank you again. There has got to be an end to this dissipation! People must be put in their places and find their proper roles!"
"So," Fox says, putting the cigarettes back on the table, fondling the matches absently in his grasp as he leans away from the suffocating odor of Graffanatis's breath; the fumes from the cigarettes, the sweet and dense air seeming to circle tightly in the room. He decides that he will never smoke again. It is never a habit which has commanded his particular loyalty, but after this particular demonstration he will bring it to a rapid halt. "So, all the time that 1 thought I was the only one involved with them you were working behind the scenes to get the information. You were in league with them."
"Well," Graffanatis says, "you know how it is. I mean, you're likely to find a lot of intrigue in affairs as crucial as this and in any event I would have quit the Solarians anyway. They're really such a dismal bunch of cowards; all that they want to do is to sit and write resolutions or somesuch and they never get anything done. Activism! Movement! Change! That's what everything is about, Fox. But I was unable to make them see it. They're such inferior stock, really. They have no minds at all, not even the best of them. Pinheads, really. They never appreciated Cupboard. Do you know I wanted to send a resolution of thanks to Tremendous when the whole thing came out, just putting the Solarians on record as approving the Quadroon Theory and they wouldn't go along with that? They thought it would be too political. Well, there's really nothing you can do with a group of that nature, of course, other than to try to overcome them in the last analysis. It took me about three years to find the right way but I've always been very slow and thorough."
Graffanatis tosses the cigarette against the wall, letting a powder of sparks emit from it, and says, "Would you hand me that glass of water, please? The one on the table. My throat seems a bit raw." Fox passes over the glass and Graffanatis drinks hurriedly, coughing and choking only a little bit and then putting the glass down with a crash. "Well." he says, "in any event, I didn't summon you here merely to hold a dialogue on the background here, although, of course, you're entitled to know it. What I really want to ask you is this, Fox: can your confidence be trusted? Can what has gone on here be limited only to you? Or are you going to spread the news around? Because if you do the latter, I'm afraid that you'd make things very very difficult for us and we'd have to take stringent action. It's a few months until Tom can use the transcripts to get the plan into operation, and in the meantime we'd prefer very much not to be embarrassed. It would make things infinitely more difficult and they won't be easy anyway. It takes time to get any worthwhile plan into full operation, you know."
"He said that it would be immediate," Fox says. "That as soon as I yielded the article things would be settled."
"Well," Graffanatis says with a giggle, "well, in terms of their operation, it is immediate, * I suppose; they live on an entirely different chronological scale than we do. What seems to be a long span of time for us really isn't that long for them. Also, you have to understand that in their kind of complicated bureaucracy, there are a lot of forms to be filled out, a lot of things to be processed, a whole set of procedures to go through. Immediate for them, maybe. Actually, it will take about twenty years until things are at the point where they're really working and we can join the galactic union. Won't that be nice? To be part of a galaxy and everything? Just think of the opportunities we'll have. It's certainly superior to the way things are now. I've been promised a very important post, incidentally. I can't talk about it right now but I should have something to say about the membership requirements."
"I don't know," Fox says. "I guess I can be trusted. I mean, there's really nobody to tell, is there? Whoever might be in a position to do something would only think that we're all crazy anyway."
"Well," Graffanatis says, sitting. "You know, by some coincidence, that's exactly what I was telling Tom: that there really wasn't anything to worry about because people from our, uh, social circle really aren't in a position to get a serious hearing anywhere. Nevertheless, we can't take chances. What I must have is absolute assurance of your confidence.
Tom said that you were a trustworthy individual in his opinion and he thought that your promise would be sufficient; I held out for more than that but I want to say that he thought that that would be enough. You seem to have impressed him very highly, I must note: I don't know why, but he said that you had 'remarkable ability and comprehension.' At least those were his words: 'remarkable ability and comprehension for someone of your race,' or something to that effect. He thought that your promise of confidence would then be sufficient and has more or less left things in my hands to resolve as I see fit.
"Would you mind if I had another cigarette? I promise that after I have this one I'll lay off for forty minutes, at least that's the way that I try to pace myself. At least twice a day and sometimes three times I don't permit myself to smoke for a full forty minutes, so it evens out. Also, I don't smoke when I sleep so there's quite a period toward the end of the day when I get my lungs back in shape."
"I don't care," Fox says.
Graffanatis takes the pack, looks at it from all angles with an eagerness which seems to sift slowly toward disgust and says, "Goddamnit, I ran out again. I'm always telling myself to have an extra pack for something like this and I never believe that it's really going to happen to me. One of these days I'm going to get caught short when the stores and bars are closed and I'll be in a real mess. Well," he says, rubbing his hands together unevenly, an expression of interest coming slowly over his face as his eyes seem to focus on other elements, "well, I'll just have to go down and get some. Unless you would like to; but of course that wouldn't be right, to release you for now, before the conclusion of the interview. So we'd just better sort of hurry things along and then go about our business. Tom wants me to exact a promise from you that you won't speak to anyone about this for a full year. Except for Susan of course, that's all right, and Stuart too: they've been in it from the first. And to me, if you want to drop up and maintain our relationship. But otherwise you are to advise no one, write no letters, make no hints and so on. Can I exact your word on that? I assure you, once things get truly organized, it will be a blessing. You won't regret any of this at all, not at all."
"Stuart's in on it?"
"And Susan as well," Graffanatis says, nodding. "They've both been very loyal and helpful here except, perhaps, a little bit too, uh, enthusiastic in playing out certain aspects of their roles. But of course they haven't been agents as long as I have."
"Ah," Fox says, with a feeling that at least he is getting to the bottom of it; for the first time since he has left the Solarians, he feels himself beginning to shift back into what he would call, for lack of a better word, Normal Focus. "Ah, then, you just tell me this: if Stuart is part of this, why didn't he turn over the issue? Why did they have to go to me? He must have had at least ten of them."
Graffanatis sighs and looks at his hands. "Well," he says, "to tell the truth, Stuart is very selfish about his rare issues and wanted to exact a price which the aliens wouldn't pay. They had to get approval from Headquarters, you know; all expenditures over a certain level must be countersigned and what Stuart was requesting was a sum at the fifteenth level of approval—something which Tom simply couldn't get. Stuart can be quite selfish sometimes. He talks about the fate of Earth and so on, but what I really think is he's interested in is his magazines and making money and nothing else. It's something that had to be put up with; we couldn't force him to do anything."
"But you could force me."
"Well, of course we could," Graffanatis says with astonishment. "Of course we could; you were one of the enemy. Stuart was on our side. That was decided all at the beginning, before the whole thing got started. It wouldn't be fair to switch in the middle of a situation, you know that? Do you promise?"
"They're really going to take us over?"
"Uh huh," Graffantis says. "First they have to break us down and then they'll take us over. It'll be better, you'll see. You and I, we'll be only about forty when we start to see the fruits of this and it'll make the whole thing worth it. Cupboard will be in his late sixties or so; it won't be so good for him. He's absolutely thrilled, of course. I was able to reach him finally by cable in Poinciana to tell him what role he had to play and he cabled back that he was most excited. Of course he's not been recognized in his own time over here, but he's never become bitter."
"All right," Fox says, a certain weariness descending over him, a desire to get out of it. It is not repudiation which has seized him so much as it is an enormous detachment: things are obviously too complex for him, have been from the start, and now he wants nothing other than to be on the other side of the situation. "All right, I promise. I promise I won't tell anyone about this. Not that anyone would believe me, but I won't."
"And you won't write any letters and you'll stay away from the Solarian meetings as well?"
"Of course," Fox says. "I'm a collector. I have no interest in fandom at all." Already he is thinking that he must replace the December 1946 as soon as possible but he dreads what Stuart will ask for it. Possibly he will be able to make a package deal for that one and the promised January 1947, at least it is worth pursuing. "I'll keep it entirely to myself."
"That's excellent," Graffanatis says, nodding and coughing. "So we're really left now with only one last question. Tom has arranged a voluntary memory wipe for you: if you want to erase any memory of what's happened between us tonight, we can just go ahead and do that. If it will make you feel any better about the whole thing, that is. All that you will remember is a certain agreement of secrecy, nothing else. It might make things easier for you. Incidentally I intend to use it myself so you shouldn't think there's any element of danger in this at all. Actually, I think that the erasure of memory is one of the best gifts a fan can have and I'm looking forward to it."
"Well," Fox says, shaking his head, "well, no. I mean, if it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon keep my memory of all this. Not that I'd tell anyone or anything like that but it would be kind of a nice thing to know. So when the things start happening all around us I'll be able to recognize what's going on and have the prideful feeling that I had a little bit of a share in it."
"Well then," Graffanatis says, "well then, if that's the way you feel, your wishes will certainly be granted." A certain surliness seems to have come into his manner, replac-ing the kind of reasonableness which he has been showing now for several minutes. "Then there's no reason to talk any further about this, Fox. You've done what you have to do and so have I. And I see no reason to prolong our relationship. Under no circumstances whatsoever would I allow you to join the Plutonians, incidentally, so don't even ask. Stuart and Susan aren't even allowed to join. All this conspiracy stuff aside, I think that their positions on many issues are very weak and I do not want them corrupting the situation further. So don't even ask. All right, Fox, get out," Graffanatis says with enormous decision.
Fox staggers to his feet again, goes to the door, stops there, tries to turn to say something devastating. But the thing is that Graffanatis is already invisible, hidden in smoke and gloom, only the thin wheezing of his breath locating him in the darkness—and that but dimly. Looking at him from this aspect, Fox senses that he is looking at something else as well: perhaps it is his whole sense of the past, perhaps it is only an intimation of the future but it is profound, there is no doubt about it. For a moment he feels that he should say something—something signatory, something to put this into perspective—but he realizes on the heels of this that there is really nothing that can be said to Graffanatis because whatever has gone on between them has gone beyond simple epitaph or communion.
He leaves quickly, trudging the stairs in a fugue of such complexity that he is barely aware of the fact that Susan and Stuart have come from the darkness, have taken his arms, and with the gentleness of strangers, the absent grace of priests, are conveying him through the streets carefully, swaying his weight gently as they move him toward the subway and that piece of rest which he so surely deserves. They say nothing nor does Fox. There is nothing to say. He realizes that they are probably as astonished by consequence as he.
By 1962 the first tentative effects of the aliens' influence began to be felt. By 1963 there were further and more massive indications. By 1964 those indications had multiplied to the point where they seemed to control the public consciousness. By the late 1960s the consequences of Cupboard's theorem could be seen in almost every aspect of the nation's public and private lives. By the early 1970's the job was complete. The nation reeled slowly toward its period of ascension and then…
Fox didn't think about it too much. He had gone back to Relief and Restoration on a Special Reinstatement and had advanced to the level of assistant supervising technician, third class—an absorbing job which fully absorbed his capabilities. His wife Susan might have been helpful in certain "discussions, but since she had elected the Memory Treatment she had little to say.