THE EXPANDING MAN

R. W. Mackelworth

Not all science fiction stories require a complex plot or setting to make them acceptable. The following story, set in a park, is solely a conversational piece, but its implications prove far-reaching.

* * * *

“What did she say?”

Algie Ryan’s face grew longer and sadder. His eyes, blue puddles in bloodshot pools, gave him the unhappy look of a tired hound. He pouted. “She said she had a bad day with the children and as soon as she put her head out of the back door a thunderbolt fell on her.”

“Humorist, eh?”

The stranger flicked some imaginary ash from his cigarette and smiled encouragement.

“I’d hardly say that. Rather the humour of desperation if you see what I mean. After all, my story must have sounded funny.” Algie stared at the sympathetic face and knew he had been right to share his troubles with this man. It was fate which had brought him to the bench in the park. “My wife is a careful woman and she’s very patient. She scrimps and scrapes every penny. I used to like the odd nip and she thought I was back on the bottle.”

“But you weren’t.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“I don’t think you were ever that kind of person, Mr. Ryan. Not the kind that tipples. I mean you have a position of trust at the bank.” The words had begun to freeze on his lips almost as he said them. It was a mistake to mention the bank.

Algie shook his head very slowly. It was symbolic of the doubt and confusion in his soul. “I run the messages. They gave me a nice, black uniform with a peak cap, but I still run the messages. Nice packaging, nothing more.”

The warm, autumn wind shuffled the trees. Wet leaves flopped on to the bench and one fell on the stranger’s lap. He looked down in horror at the damp leaf, brown and decayed, breaking down to a thin skeleton. His clean face wore the fastidious frown of the puritan. He picked it up carefully and dropped it on to the gravel path.

“Did he tell you his name?”

The question was a sly one. Algie wondered if he had done the right thing, talking to this man, after all. His instinct put him on his guard suddenly. “He didn’t have time to tell me.”

The stranger seemed relieved. He actually sighed as if a great burden had been lifted, a burden as murky as the dead leaf.

“What’s your name, then?” Algie inspected his companion with the shrewd skill of a man who spent his time with money. Other people’s cash made its own demands. One never knew when some of it might end up in his own pocket under stress of temptation. Or, worse, in someone else’s pocket. Especially if the thief carried a cosh. Either way the police would blame him because he was the lowest common denominator in the bank and a ready-made scapegoat.

“Smith. My name is Smith.”

“Ah.”

A long moment of silence followed. The wind sighed and howled across the park as if they had buried a giant alive under the rough turf and he was still breathing hard. The silence ended with the loud clatter of municipal dustbin lids chasing one another from the shelter of the broken-down public convenience. The park had a certain wild beauty.

Smith obviously knew he had fallen foul of Ryan’s suspicions. He had to switch the course of the discussion. With an inner quake of hilarity he realized that Ryan thought he was after information about the bank. How wrong he was! He was after life and death not paper money.

“This man you were telling me about. You said your wife didn’t believe you, that she mocked you. Did you tell anyone else?”

“No.”

“What did this man get from you before he vanished?”

Algie looked guilty, but that was nothing to go by. He always looked guilty. At school he had blushed every time the headmaster spoke in solemn tones from the musty stage about another petty thief. The headmaster liked to pick him out with a pointed glare. Of course he knew Algie hadn’t done it, but it gave him a due sense of majesty.

“I told him nothing.”

“Except your name, your job and the colour of your wife’s eyes. Then you went on about life in general and the iniquity of your manager.”

“How do you know?”

Algie appeared astounded by Mr. Smith’s knowledge. It was as if the cold, grey eyes had peered into his mind and laid all bare.

“You are the kind of man who confesses, Mr. Ryan. All confessions run along the same line—a protest, a windy grumble with the tensions running out in an acid stream.” It was a satisfied voice which summed up Algie’s weakness. “The point is, what did he tell you.”

Algie was on his guard. He had been insulted, but the insult was laced with power. It was the sort of rebuff an inferior man had to accept from his master. He could hear the bank manager saying, “You can make the tea, can’t you, Ryan? The woman is ill and the junior won’t do it.” Yes, it was the same calm assurance in Smith’s tone.

“He told me nothing.”

“He told you of a wonderful world where people are free from the chains and bondage of bank managers and uniforms. Where women don’t fall ill and juniors would love to make the tea and men of your maturity get the respect they deserve.”

Smith was indeed reading his mind! That was why he had seemed so sympathetic. That was why he had been there on the park bench and why he had told him about the strange man. Algie felt uneasy.

Would there be another occurrence?

Could Smith work the trick and vanish ?

“The other man vanished?” Smith smiled with an odious superiority. “How did he vanish? Tell me about it, Algie.”

The hollow cheeks lost what colour they had and the thin neck jerked this way and that like an old hen waiting the chopping block. “I can hardly remember.”

“Yes, you can remember, Algie.”

“It was very cold. I remember that much. It was so cold in the park it made me feel naked. The clothes they had given me were flapping around me like wet rags and they were torn when I skipped over the wall.” Algie hugged his arms across his body as if he could feel the bitter wind. “For a long time I wandered about until, finally, I found this same bench.”

“And he was sitting here?”

“No, he came a little later.”

“How?”

“He just appeared. One moment he wasn’t there and then a light flashed over the heath and he was lolling at the end of the bench as if it was a fine warm night.”

Smith smiled again and took out a silver cigarette case. He drew one for himself and allowed Algie to see the gold monogram printed on the cigarette paper like an imprint of wealth on pure, white linen. Then he put the case away.

“Didn’t you feel any fear, Algie?”

“Not at all. He had a very nice face. It was just the kind of face you tell your troubles to. So I did.”

“You spoke to him, but later on you noticed a change?”

The tired face seemed to develop a new vigour. There was even a faint light in the weary eyes as if memory had kindled a fire somewhere. “I sensed he wasn’t ordinary, that he was from out of this world, and I accepted it. Then, as I told him my troubles he seemed to grow until he filled the whole of my view.”

Smith was irritated by the sympathy for the other man which had betrayed itself in Algie’s face and voice. He wanted to prick the bubble. “It can all be explained. Look, little man ...” He began to expand slowly like an uncertain balloon. His neat figure and his pretty face lost their perfect shapes. He was a growing combination of blowing curves and bulging, rounded angels. As suddenly he deflated.

There wasn’t even a hiss.

Algie shook his head. “Not quite like that. More graceful.”

“Damn him!” Smith peeled off his fine gloves. He laid them carefully on the seat beside him. On his fingers were several diamond rings which flashed in the sunlight. One of these he twisted with neat, precise movements until a single stone extended from the thin, gold band on a fine silver wire.

“This is a gadget, Algie, with which I can talk to the Moon or a thousand planets. Just like your radio. Now, the other man had a ring like this and half a dozen others just like mine. When he appeared he used one of these, and when he disappeared he used another. Whatever he made you think, he was no miracle worker. I can do anything he could do.”

“I’m sure you could try, but you haven’t got the same manner.” Algie stared at Smith and at the diamonds flashing on his fingers. He wished he could assess their value for a bank loan or better still for probate. There was nothing likable about Mr. Smith. “You come from the same place, don’t you ? Or is it the other side of the same place ?”

Smith returned his stare with distaste. “It isn’t a fairytale heaven and earth, man. I am a scientist and the other man was a scientist. If anyone was lacking in ethics it was he not I.”

“But he did good.”

“He did good,” Smith mimicked his pathetic whine with derision. “What do you mean, he did good?”

“When I told him my troubles they hurt him. He seemed to take them into himself, if you know what I mean, and as he took them he grew larger with them ... until he was enormous, a great skinful of my problems, of small household nags and big bank tyrannies. I thought he would explode.”

“It was a trick, a conjuring trick for ignorant natives! He broke every political agreement and every solemn pact of non-interference that’s ever been made in this sector of space-time merely by speaking to you.” Smith spoke up like a small-town politician who hadn’t had time to fix the ballot boxes and knew he had lost to the other candidate. The other side was breeding a nimblet race of mice. “What good did he do?”

Algie looked at him sadly. “I don’t think you will understand.” He dived into his pocket and pulled out a bottle. It was tiny, with a screw cap and a little label, very worn. The up-and-down scrawl of the chemist had been almost obliterated. Algie took one of the capsules from the bottle and rolled it on to Mr. Smith’s lap. “He cured me. I don’t need these any more.”

“Cured you?”

The thin man nodded positively. “Well, very nearly. You see, I couldn’t let him go on because when he had heard most of my troubles he was as big as the park and there was still a bit left deep down inside me. I had a feeling he would explode if he took the lot, especially as the deeper I dug the more effect it had on him.” He sat back and spread his thin legs across the path. It was a satisfied posture like a man who had made a good day and was resting.

“Listen!” The voice thundered like the black roll of storm clouds. “He was trying to impress you. Where he comes from the ability to expand is as common as a blush. It’s an old defence mechanism which his race received as an inheritance from primitive days. Lots of your creatures can do the same. Even you can raise the hair on your head if you are scared, can’t you?”

Algie nodded, and then he grinned. Two flattened wisps were all that continued the straggling battle across his high, ridged pate. “All the same he cured me, I tell you. Why I’ve even had a promise of my old job back at the bank.”

Smith was very silent. He didn’t feel very well. When he had read the wretched creature’s mind he had distinctly picked up the facts. Yet, here the man was telling him that he wasn’t working at the bank after all. Had Algie found the secret of screening the mind? If so the whole planet was on the point of breakthrough!

Was that why the other side had made an approach ?

No!

It couldn’t be true. There hadn’t been enough time for the special faculties to develop, and this ragged, lop-jawed misery wouldn’t be the one who broke into the communion of the universal life-stream. That would take the finest mind in its finest hour, not a broken-down wage slave.

There were tears in Algie’s eyes. “I was a drunken bum, mister. Before I met him I was taking the cure. The bank had thrown me out and all was lost. I was a bit confused. Even the walls seemed to be walking pink elephants.”

Monstrous creatures stalked across Mr. Smith’s inner vision, staring at him wisely. A green snake whispered between their trampling legs and shot out its green tongue at him. He felt sick. “The other man saw all this?”

“And took it away. He substituted a warm picture of clean bank vaults where temperance reigns supreme. It brought back happy thoughts of security. When he left I went straight back to the institution, whose walls you can see hanging over the park as you come in like iron curtain justice, and gave myself up again.”

“You had escaped from prison.” Smith made it a statement. There was no point in making it a question. “You were a drunk, and you slobbered your horrible story to this man and he cleaned up your mind.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. No emotion though like the Salvationists and no cold comfort like the quacks—with their sharp jab in the backside and weeks in the tank fighting off a zoo full of bright snakes—but more like the A.A. if you know what I mean. Tell all your troubles to a fellow sufferer who has beaten the rap and you get the strength to leave it alone.” A beautiful glow of strength illuminated Algiers tired eyes.

“But I thought you said you were back in the bank now and had never left it?”

“My imagination, friend. It’s always plagued me and that’s why I drank, if you want to know. I was a sensitive child with complexes.”

Smith picked up his gloves and put them on very slowly. He knew what he had to do. Someone from the other side had visited this planet. He had actually given aid and comfort to an inhabitant and had set in motion a chain of events which might reveal the truth before it was permitted. If this man on the bench talked and the planet believed him, all was lost. Materialism might sweep across the universe like a rotten plague propelled onwards by a primitive race who would have no idea of what they were wrecking.

He had to kill Algie.

Algie suddenly felt very uneasy. He sensed danger. All his life he had dodged bombs, from the sky and under the ground, and he had an instinct for them. When a bomb dropped, Algie could be seen running for the open. He ran so fast the army never caught him to court-martial him for running.

Smith knew the sacrifice he had to make. The law was clear. If he took Algie’s life he had to do it with his own. He must expand the cells of his body until they tore from their fellows and blew Algie and the bench into pieces of nameless plasma. All because one man, and from the other side at that, had broken the eternal rule and interfered with a primitive race. Why?

“Easy, mister. He wanted to meet me.”

Smith sought the slovenly folds which supported Algie’s eyes. A happy thought was dawning in his mind. Could it be that the planet was near its spiritual breakthrough? It was impossible! They were in a post-atomic period, a positive step backwards even from the brief, high point of their renaissance and that was virtually nothing. Yet, Algie had just read his mind.

“Puzzles you, doesn’t it? Perhaps you haven’t met a crew like us before. You see, when one of our people gets funny ideas about reading minds and so on, they lock them up.”

“They do what?” The stranger felt lost and very nearly confused for the first time in his life. He had heard of culture shock, but now it was on him it had him by the ears.

“Lock them up or put them in a pulpit.”

“You mean every one of them is different?”

“In some ways. Each one comes in with a different ability or an indifferent ability like mine. Most of it’s wasted. Some of it never shows. If it’s strange, then they don’t like it at all.”

“I see.” Smith did see. He understood why the other man had tried an experiment. It was an effort to find out how this strange race worked. Perhaps he had thought each individual would have to be dealt with and brought to his salvation one by one. A novel idea.

But had he been right ?

Obviously not. He had realized it at the end, too. With certain proof, out of Algie’s own mind, he had only one course. He would have had to kill himself and Algie as he, Smith, would have to kill Algie. Hold on! If the other man had tried to rectify his interference and had exploded himself, how was it the thin man was still alive ?

“Did he explode, Algie?”

The thin man nodded.

“Where were you?”

“Over the other side of the park and running. He set fire to the trees and I got the blame, but I didn’t mind. Not after what he did for me.”

Smith saw the point once again. He would have to fling his arms round Algie and hold on tight. It was almost sickening, but Earth must not become a political shuffle-board or spread its contaminating breath of barbarity round the universe. Algie knew too much, and though he had the rudiment of the gift he had no real idea of how to use it.

Algie slipped his arms out of the sleeves of his jacket and made his body as much into a tube as he could. Nothing like all the training of an old busker family to help in a pinch. Wasn’t his father a houdini and a hard case to boot. Just as his mother had read minds and picked pockets.

Smith wrapped his arms round the rigid body.

Thoughts whipped through the far distances from place to place and were relayed back with comment. They were pleased with him but puzzled. “High survival factor here,” one said and another added, “They could break loose without us. A genuinely new culture.”

But Smith had to stop the rot. They had to have time to think it out. He had to blow his body to pieces and face a wait of a century or so for a new one to take its place, wandering perhaps in the empty space in penance, in the meantime. He expanded with all his concentration. It had to be quick.

Algie stood behind the great oak at the other end of the park. He saw the damage done to the flower-beds and the trees scorched and stripped of their leaves. Even as he spotted the police, with the usual pair of white-coated male nurses, he didn’t mind. They would blame him. Just as he had a job lined up with the old bank mob, too, and it wasn’t the kind of job he had indicated to the gullible Smith—rather an over-the-back-wall-and-blow-the-safe-quickly gambit. The mob would be very disappointed!

Still, when he was back inside he would give old Doc Klenk something to think about. He thought he had worked a quick cure, but now he would insist on a new course of pills, big pills, he bet, fit for cart horses. Never mind, he had learned a lot.

He shambled back towards the white-coated nurses and the police, apprehensive of a sharp crack behind the ear, until he saw neither of the nurses was one of the sadist squad. His back straightened and he thought tenderly of Smith. Poor con-man, but a perfect gent. He wondered how they had managed that expanding gimmick.

Voices drifted in.

“Clever monkeys ... one day they may be all over us ... clever monkeys with imaginations ... and souls to find. Wait ... wait until we know ... genuinely new culture.”

Algie did a little skip. His mind filled the park and played and soared with the leaves, scattering the dustbin lids around the public convenience jumbled in with leaping police hats and doing a crazy dance.

Algie, the real expanding man.