The Perfect Host (50 page)

“Yess?” It was the same voice, too—full and precise.

Hulon said: “You’re Conrad Veidt.” He had meant to say: “You
look
like—” but the way the man turned, the way his eyebrow arched, were too like what he had seen on the screen to allow any doubt.

“Am I?” said the man, and smiled. “And do you believe in immortality?”

Hulon shuffled his feet. “Well, I … I guess not. No, of course not.”

The man shrugged. “You know Conrad Veidt is dead. Obviously you are mistaken. Good day.”

“ ’Bye,” said Hulon miserably. He watched the man walk away, and stood there feeling very, very foolish.

That was the first dead man, Hulon thought as he crouched against the wall of the strange corridor. Another bubble circled and danced clumsily near him. He kicked at it; it burst and its fluid disappeared into the floor. Now—who was the second?

Leslie Howard—two days later, under exactly similar circumstances: a Leslie Howard picture, a familiar profile in the loges just before Frank relieved him. He remembered wondering, as he hurried after the figure from the past, down the aisle and through the lobby, whether his attention had been drawn purposely this way, by some mysterious means, or whether it was purely accidental. If it was on purpose, what could be the purpose? What was he, that he should receive such attentions from—He lost the thought in the moment of panic in which he stood in front of the theater, peering, thinking he had lost his man. He saw him, then, at the magazine stand, buying a copy of
Coswell’s Magazine
. Hulon stepped up to him. “May I have a word with you?”

The man looked at him, his head very slightly held to one side in Howard’s well-remembered way. “Certainly, old man.”

Hulon wet his lips. He was going to be more cautious this time. “I think you’re Leslie Howard.”

“The devil you do! Wasn’t he killed during the war?”

“So they say.”

“Then how could I possibly be?”

“I don’t know. I’m not even trying to find that out. Look, whoever you are; please don’t think I’m a crackpot. I’m just sort of clutching at straws, I suppose. I’ve got some—ideas. I do what I can with them, but as far as I can see, it’ll take me more than a lifetime to work them all out. When I see someone alive who ought to be dead, something happens to me. I know it must be a resemblance, but in the zillion to one chance that a man might live longer than an average lifetime—much longer, I mean—why, I go hog-wild on it, hunt it out, track it down, just like”—the torrent of words slowed, stopped, and Hulon stood flushing while the other waited politely—“I’m
doing with you right now.” He laughed uncertainly. “I don’t know why I feel I can sound off like this to you.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment,” smiled the other, and clapped him on the shoulder. “But—Leslie Howard was killed, all right. Sorry.” And he walked off.

Hulon thought.
No one can know a person’s face like a projectionist
.

Day after day, hour after hour these faces are drilled into him; nuances of voice and expression emerge that the public never sees, any more than the public sees the flicker of a starting-cue.

The Leslie Howard man paused and said a word to a girl who stood in the doorway of the haberdashery two doors down from the Empire. She nodded and the man went away. She stood still; Hulon went toward her.
I can just walk by and look at her. There’s something—

As he neared her, she turned, and he gasped. That strange, full-lipped face and spun-aluminum hair … they used to call her “The Blonde Bombshell.” She was dead too. “Jean Harlow,” he choked.

She smiled and put out her hand. “How do you do?” she said astonishingly.

He took the hand, his own self-animated to do so. He looked down at the clasped hands as if, at the job, he had found film with triangular sprocket-holes. He looked at her face and blinked. “My name’s Hulon—”

“And it’s your first name,” said the blonde. “I know. Can we go somewhere to talk?”

He noticed under her arm the familiar orange cover of
Coswell’s Magazine
—the issue in which his article had appeared. He said: “The Empire Bar has booths.”

They went there.
I’ll wait
, he thought.
This is crazy; there are too many questions to ask. I’ll wait. She knows what she’s doing
.

She asked: “How much education have you had, Hulon?”

He helped her with her coat and sat opposite. “Not much. High school. I read some.”

“What made you submit to
Coswell’s?
”

“They use things like that. I thought I had an important idea. It’s part of a … call it a philosophy, if that doesn’t sound too high-falutin’,” he said.

“It’s a philosophy,” she said. “We can call things by their names. What a funny, shy sort of person, you are, Hulon!”

There was nothing to say to this, so he waited. A waiter came and went. Drinks arrived. “What got you interested in the idea of security enough to provoke an article like this?”

“I’m a theater projectionist. I don’t follow pictures too closely, but a lot of what they’re about sinks in. Seems to me a lot of real-life people are worried about security, too. I began to listen to people I know talk. A lot of them are worried about it. I began to wonder where it was. Everybody thinks it’s somewhere else, never where a man can lay his hand to it and say, ‘Here it is. I have it.’ So I figured out where it was, and wrote it down, and
Coswell’s
printed it. That’s all.”

“I read the article. But tell me again—where is security?”

“Behind us.” He looked at her expectant face, and expanded the statement. “No use looking into the future for security because the future doesn’t belong to us—it’s a dream, a bunch of maybes. No use looking in the present for it because the present is, in time, like a mathematical point—a position, without any area. So the only thing a man has is behind him—his memories. The only thing a man can look forward to is looking back at where he’s been. What he has means nothing. What he
has had
is the only thing he can hold on to—the only thing that no power on Earth can touch. And anybody who tries to run security down will come up against that—possessions that nothing can touch, things that really belong to a man. So”—he shrugged—“security is not in the future, a sort of mountaintop that people are climbing to. And it isn’t in the present, because ‘now’ covers such a small area in time that it’s nonexistent; you can’t have security or a cigarette or an automobile in a portion of time so small it can’t be measured. It’s behind us. It lies only in what we’ve had and in what we’ve done.”

“That’s a startling idea,” she said. “It sort of takes away any possibility of self-determination, though, doesn’t it? According to your idea, a man can act only in his present, and the present is too short a time to do anything with.”

“No it isn’t,” said Hulon positively. “You can do this much with your present—you can shape the nature of things to form the best possible memory for yourself. You can form the cross section of the passing time-stream as if you were a diamond die, and give it just the cross section that will suit your memory the best.”

“And that means that there can be no security for
now
, for this minute?”

“No,” Hulon said again. “Security for this minute is a kind of self-confidence that comes from a sort of radar; impulses sent from now, reflecting from things we have been and had and done.”

“Good,” said the girl. “I’m sorry to be catechizing you like this. I had to know whether you retain what you set down or whether you were amusing yourself with a passing idea. Now tell me; is this security business your philosophy?”

“Oh no,” said Hulon. “It’s just part of it. It comes from it.”

“Ah. And have you reduced that philosophy to its essentials? Can you say what it is in a few words?”

“Not yet. Not few enough.” He pondered for a moment. “I can say this much. And mind you, it isn’t as rock bottom as it will be, but it’s as far as I’ve gone, from watching people, and machines, and from reading and listening to music. It’s this:

“What is basic is important.

“What is basic is simple.

“So what is complicated isn’t important. It might be interesting or exciting—it might even be necessary to something else that’s complicated—but it isn’t important.”

She nodded. “That’s good. That’s very good. And—what would you do with an idea like that? Turn the whole world into a gigantic Walden?”

Hulon had not read Thoreau. He missed the reference, and said so. When she explained, he said: “Gosh no. I’m no fanatic, wanting to get everybody back to hunting, fishing and building their own log cabins. All I want to do is to think everything out according to that idea of mine. I mean everything: art and engineering and business and politics. I think I could work it all out, if I had time.”

“And then what would you do with it?”

“I’d try to teach it to people—to more and more people, until it got to be a natural way of thinking. The way people let themselves think now just makes trouble. People think if it’s bigger it’s better. They think if a little is good, a lot has just got to be wonderful. They can see the sense of balance in a diet or in a bridge, but they stop too easily at things like that, and don’t try to balance enough other things. Or enough other
kinds
of things,” he added, after a pause. “But all that’s ’way ahead of me. What bothers me now is that I don’t have time to think all this out. I know how big it is, and what a little moment a life is. I could do more with an idea like this if I knew, somehow, that all my thinking wasn’t going to get cut off one fine day by the old man with the scythe.”

“And that’s really important to you?”

“Really important. Basic,” he added, grinning shyly. “So much that if I see someone on the street who ought to be dead, I’ll stop and ask him who he is, just in case—just on the crazy chance that someone might’ve found out how to live longer.”

“How do you know anyone could?”

Hulon spread his hands. “I don’t. But it could happen. Old age is some kind of a biological mistake. Maybe someone has figured out where the mistake was made. Maybe that was done a long time ago. If it had been done, it wouldn’t be the sort of thing you’d advertise in the daily papers. Too many people are afraid of dying. Too many more people want to live so that they can get more and more things, more and more power. People would mob whoever had a treatment like that to sell, and either the wrong people would live long, or the treatment would overpopulate the Earth, and the human race would war itself out of existence for food and space to live.”

“You’re so right. You have a startling kind of simplicity, Hulon. You drive and drive right to the root of a thing. Suppose there were such a treatment; can you say anything else about the person or persons who might control it?”

Hulon thought for a moment. “I think so. They would be very careful people. They would have to be able to consider the greatest good for humanity above any race or religious or national lines. They would have to be able to think ahead—years, centuries ahead. They
would have to be able to hold their hands, keep from interfering, even when interfering might save thousands of lives. They would have to put pressure here and nudge a little there in quiet ways, so that they would never be found out, and so that humanity would always think it was learning from its own mistakes and nothing else.”

“Do you think you are such a person?”

“No!” Hulon said immediately. “But I know I could be if I lived long enough. I think the right way to be that kind of person.” The statement was simple and sincere, without braggadocio.

The girl considered him for a long, pensive moment. At last she asked him softly: “If there were immortals on Earth, and if they were all you say, what would be their most urgent need?”

Twice, captured by her eyes, he opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. Finally he said: “Recruits.”

She held her gaze on him, unmoving; then she nodded, as if to herself. “How much would you give for a chance to join them?”

“How much have I got? I’d give anything.”

“Your life? Would you undertake a test that would kill you if you failed?”

“Of course.”

She swirled her drink, “Hulon. Nothing is unique about that philosophy of yours. There is something unusual about your method. You’ve come a long way on very little material. You think clearly and your motives are clean. That’s not much to go on. If you took such a test, the odds would be very much against you.”

“Tell me,” he asked, wrinkling his brow. “Why would I have to die if I failed?”

“Because you’d know too much.”

“I know a great deal now.”

“You are having a barroom conversation with a girl you picked up,” she said bluntly. “No one would believe a word you might say even if I confirmed it, which of course I wouldn’t. But if—and mind you, I’m still talking ifs—if such a situation did exist, and if you did take such a test, fail it, and emerge from it, you might cause trouble. Such a risk cannot be taken.”

“That makes sense. Well, when do I start?”

She opened her handbag and took out a lipstick. Unscrewing the cap, she slipped a nail file from under the flap of the purse and inserted it into the cap. She worked it deftly forward and back; it fell into two parts, and a small blue pill rolled into the hollow of her hand. She took Hulon’s glass and dropped the tablet in. The liquid began to effervesce violently. She handed it back. “When the effervescence stops, drink it immediately. All of it.”

He took it, held it, waiting, and said gravely: “Are you Jean Harlow?”

She laughed. “Of course not. You had to seek us out, and you had to do it because you might find one case of extended life, and not for any other reason. You passed that part of it, Hulon. We did it this way because you are a projectionist; you could be expected to notice us particularly. We have other ways, too.”

It was the first time she had said “we.” His heart began to pound. Abruptly the activity in the glass ceased, completely. “May you live forever,” he said, and drank it down.

He could not remember very clearly what happened after that. He saw clearly, he walked steadily, he spoke coherently. There is a linkage between the conscious mind and the memory, through which flows each impression, as noticed, to be stored. And in Hulon, this link was broken, or at least compressed, pinched off, so that any impression, once received, was lost in seconds. He remembered walking, and then a ride—it was a car, but whether a taxi or a private automobile he could not recall—and, after riding for a time which may have been minutes or hours, there was a room with several people in it. The girl was lost somewhere en route; there were other women, but how many or what they looked like was lost to him. There was a man with a stern gray face who talked with him for a long time, and a room with a wheeled table and pale-green cornerless walls. And there was a time when he repeated and repeated two questions: