Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (22 page)

Mary Gnaedinger had called him earlier in the day. She was desperate. An entire issue of
Famous Fantastic Mysteries
had been lost on the way to the printer in Ohio. The novel was no problem—she had two bound copies of that in her own bookcase—but she had no other copies of the three short-story reprints, and she was unable to find them anywhere in the short deadline she had been given by the publisher. She needed three short stories, the exact length of the missing three, and she needed them in twenty-four hours.

"That's why it was so important you come on time," Ted said. He had phoned Ray Bradbury in California (
expensive
in those days), and Bradbury had agreed to write one of the 2,100-word pieces immediately and ship it to Mary air-mail special-delivery.

"You and I," Ted told me, "will write the other two, and I'll take them to Mary in the morning."

I remember I grimaced unhappily. "But, damn it all, Ted, I don't have a single idea in my head!"

"Nonsense," he said. "Are you a writer, or aren't you a writer? You will use Ree's typewriter, and I will use my typewriter, and we'll sit back to back, and each of us will write a short and delightful fantasy for Mary."

"About
what
?" I wailed. "For the love of God, Montresor, about
what
?"

Ted thought. "You'll write about vampires," he said finally. "Mary loves stories about vampires. You'll find a new angle about vampires and write about that. Now, let's get started. Remember, we've only got tonight."

Then he put two chairs back to back. In front of one chair was his typewriter table, and on it was his Royal portable. In front of the other chair was Ree's typewriter table and Ree's Royal portable. He sat down before his typewriter and began typing immediately. Ree made coffee, which was all Ree ever did around a kitchen.

What the hell could I do? I sat down with my back to him and began typing as if I really knew what I was doing.

I wrote a story I called "The Human Angle."

Ted wrote a story he called "So Big."

Mary had all three pieces late the next day. I don't remember what Bradbury called his story. I do remember it as a very good story, though.

Written 1948——Published 1948

Irving Bommer had been wistfully following a girl in a green frock when the absolutely fantastic thing happened to him.

A compliment.

The gypsy woman, who sat on and overflowed the stone step in front of her soiled little shop, leaned forward and called: "'Ey, Mistair!" Then, as he broke his plodding stride to consider her and the window full of dream-books and numerology texts, she cleared her throat with the sound of lumpy oatmeal being stirred.

"'Ey, Mistair! You, the 'ansome wan!"

Irving rocked on one foot, came to a dead stop and watched the girl maneuver the green frock around the corner and out of his life.

For the moment, he was paralyzed. He could not leave the neighborhood of that delectable compliment even—even if Humphries himself, the housewares buyer of Gregworth's, had materialized from behind an invisible counter and snapped his fingers.

But then, of course. Some people thought it was funny. Some people, especially women... His pale cheeks slowly ripened as he cudgeled his slow brain to find a retort both clever and devastating. "A-a-ah!" he began extemporaneously.

"Come 'ere, 'ansome mistair," she commanded, with no trace of mockery. "Inside, you gat what you wan' so badly. I 'ave it."

What he wanted badly? How did she know? Even he, Irving Bommer, had only the vaguest conception. Yet, he found himself following her wide, swinging body through the doorway into a store drearily furnished with three folding chairs and a bridge table on which rested a cracked crystal ball. Five children of astonishingly overlapping ages played in front of a torn bedsheet which curtained off the back room. At a peremptory bawl from the woman, they tumbled out of sight through the sheet.

As he settled into a folding chair that immediately leaned into a forty-five-degree angle with the floor, Irving Bommer wondered hazily what he was doing there. He remembered that Mrs. Nagenbeck had told him when he first rented a room from her: "Never keep
no
supper for
no
boarder at
no
time" and, since today had been monthly inventory in the housewares department, he was both late and hungry. Still...

You never knew what these gypsies might come up with. They were certainly a discerning bunch. They had standards of beauty that weren't poured out of the Hollywood mold; they came of a race that had been cosmopolitan since Pilate; they could recognize things like nobility of soul and—well, perhaps even handsomeness—worldly, mature handsomeness, you could call it.

"Well, uh," he essayed a chuckle. "What do you have that I—that I—uh—want so badly? A dream book to clean up on the races? Never play the races. And I never have my fortune told, either."

She stood before him in multifidious flesh and multitudinous colorful clothing, examining him gravely out of tiny, tired black eyes. "No," she said at last. "For you no fortune I tal. I geeve this."

There was a medicine bottle in her outstretched hand, a bottle filled with a bubbly purple liquid which changed to a rich red and then a somber blue under the shadow-thick twilight pressing in from the shop window.

"What—what is it?" he asked, though he knew suddenly there was but one thing he could be offered.

"Belong my 'osban. Many years he take to make eet. He 'ave this, he die. Bot you, ees deeferen. You entitle. Eet geeve you woman."

Irving Bommer started at the insult. He tried to laugh, but gasped his belief, his desire, instead. Woman!

"You mean it's a potion—a love philter?" His voice cracked between the conflict of ridicule and acceptance.

"Pheeltair. Wan I see you, I know you need. You 'ave moch onhoppiness. Vairy leetle hoppy. Bot remembair, use only to take bock what 'as been taken. Your blood on drop from pheeltair makes drop from pheeltair yours. Wan drop at time. Ten dollars, please."

That did it. Ten dollars! For some colored water she'd mixed up in the back room. Just because he'd been gullible enough to walk inside. Not for Irving Bommer. He was nobody's fool.

"I'm nobody's fool," he told her, finding the thought good enough to articulate. He stood up and shook himself.

"Leesen!" The gypsy woman's voice was hoarse and commanding. "You being fool now. You need. I could osk feefty, I could osk a tousand. I osk ten because thot is price, because you 'ave ten, because you need. And I—I don' need now. Don' be fool. Take eet. You be—you be really 'ansome."

Irving found the sneer wouldn't stay put, that the door was too far away. Very slowly, he counted out ten dollars, leaving himself only two until payday. Even the recollection of the fantastically expensive bottle of aftershave lotion he had been persuaded to purchase last week didn't inhibit him. He—just had to...

"Wan drop of blood wan you use," the woman called after him as he hurried out of the shop. "Good luck, mistair."

By the time he had walked the two long blocks to his boarding house, the wildly hopeful elation had subsided into the usual abiding humiliation.

"What a sucker, what a sucker!" he raged as he slipped into the back entrance of Mrs. Nagenbeck's boarding house and climbed the stairs. Irving Bommer, the all-time champ of suckers! Show him anything and he bought it. Love philters!

But when he had slammed the door of his thin little room behind him, when he had tossed the small bottle viciously to the bed, he bit his lips and drooled two huge tears out of his near-sighted eyes.

"If only I had a face instead of a comic drawing," he bawled. "If only—oh, dammit!"

Then his mind, being relatively sane, refused to deal any longer in these terms.
Let us daydream,
said his mind to his reeling subconscious;
let us daydream and imagine how pleasant it could be.

—|—

So he sat on the bed, his chin nursing blissfully on one drawn-up knee, and dreamed of a correctly created world where women schemed for his attention and fought for his person; where, unable to win him privately, they shared him willy-nilly with equally determined sisters. Through this glorious place, he wandered familiarly, pleased as always by the way the rules kept changing in his favor.

Sometimes he was the only male left alive after an atomic catastrophe; and sometimes he reclined on purple cushions, puffing on his hookah while a harem full of breath-taking
houri
waited adoringly; and yet other times, dozens of men—all their faces curiously reminiscent of Humphries, the housewares buyer—watched in stolid despair as Bommer the rich, Bommer the successful, Bommer the incredibly couth, escorted their wives, fiancees, and special girlfriends out of rather roomy limousines into a bachelor's apartment so multiplex as to occupy the whole of a Park Avenue building.

Now and then, there might be a sequence—a painless one!—with a plastic surgeon, which talented gentleman, having committed his masterpiece, would die of satisfaction before he could mar his work by duplicating it. Frequently, Irving Bommer would postpone the difficult choice between a statuesque, glowing blonde and a pert little redhead long enough to ponder upon such events as his having grown past six feet two inches with no noticeable tremors, as his shoulders having broadened, his feet unflattened, his nose diminished, and straightened. While he enjoyed the new resonance of his voice and the catchy heartiness of his laughter, while he was proud of his perfect, ever-poised wit and his exact, all-purpose education, it was to his splendid physical attributes that he found himself continually returning. That head of hair which spilled carelessly over his bald spot, that third set of teeth miraculously growing past the ruins of yellowed enamel and cheap bridgework, that stomach, no longer catching the eye through a bubbly paunch, but decently hidden behind a wall of muscle. That stomach! In it were now to be found only the finest vintage wines, the tastiest dishes prepared by the most expert chefs, the most succulent, the most delicious...

With an abrupt gulp, Irving Bommer swallowed the saliva which had collected in his mouth and realized he was violently hungry.

According to his watch, the kitchen would be dark and empty; it was accessible by way of the back staircase which passed his room in its creaking descent.

Mrs. Nagenbeck, however, when aroused by an unauthorized raid on her larder, tended to combine the most significant characteristics of each of the Three Furies in one harmonious whole. Why, Irving Bommer quivered, if she caught him—

Well, friend, that's a chance we'll just have to take,
his stomach interposed harshly.

Sighing with trepidation, he went noisily downstairs on the top-most tips of his toes.

Feeling around in the darkness, he touched the refrigerator padlock. He frowned hungrily. A careful search of the kitchen and some emphatic shin-barking, however, netted him three-fourths of a salami, half a loaf of rye bread, and a heavy triangular-bladed knife of the type which is indispensable when boarding a Spanish galleon from a British privateer.

Oke,
said his stomach, licking its duodenum.
Let's start!

A light clicked on in the room behind the kitchen. Irving stopped in mid-slice, his body absolutely still, but his heart and still-talkative stomach somersaulting against each other like a pair of acrobats in a rousing vaudeville finale. As whenever he was frightened, he began to perspire so profusely that his feet slid around in their tight shoes.

"Who's there?" Mrs. Nagenbeck called. "Anyone in the kitchen?"

Declining to answer her, even in the negative, Irving Bommer fled upstairs damply, with his food, knife, and now thoroughly confused internal anatomy.

Back in his room, fingers on the light switch, he gasped for a moment, listened for a moment, then smiled. He had left no traces.

He sauntered leisurely to the bed, eating a slice of salami off the knife with wonderfully unselfconscious courage. The purple medicine lay where he had thrown it. It looked red; it also looked slightly blue; then again, sometimes...

He sat down and started to unscrew the bottle cap with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and slowly raised two sloppy eyebrows at the difficulty.
So,
he thought,
we shift the knife to the right hand, sort of holding the blade under our armpit, get a good grip on the bottle with our left hand, and strenuously twist the cap. Meanwhile, we continue to munch.
Under our armpit, the knife blade squirms anxiously, trying to get a good sight on a valuable organ.

The cap was stuck fast. Maybe you weren't supposed to open it. Maybe you smashed the bottle and used it all at once. He could worry about it later, in any case. At the moment, he had salami, he had rye bread. And two dollars instead of twelve.

He started to put the bottle down, giving it an irritated half-twist back and forth to show that he wasn't through with it. The cap loosened. Bommer unscrewed it all the way, more than a little startled. He'd never known they made medicine bottles with left-hand threads.

—|—

Odd smell. Like—like a soaped, scrubbed, and freshly diapered infant who had abruptly decided that a full bladder was not half so pleasant as an empty one; and the liquid in the bottle was blue. He smelled again. No, more like a very hairy man who'd spent a busy afternoon with pick and shovel and couldn't see any sense in taking a bath today and smashing one of his most cherished personal traditions. Yet as Irving Bommer meditated at the glass vial now, it shone with a flashing scarlet. As he brought it under his nose for one last sniff, he marveled at how he had misjudged the odor: unpleasant it was, very much so, but you could identify it easily. It was... not exactly stale tobacco smoke... no, nor a recently manured field—

He spilled a little on his left palm. Purple.

A fist clump-clump-clumped on his door. "Hey, there!" Mrs. Nagenbeck yelled. "You, Mr. Bommer! Open this door! I know what you got in there. You got my food in there. Open that door!"