Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (23 page)

At Irving Bommer's convulsion, the knife under his armpit made a wild leap for freedom and glory. It aimed at a wrist where, with any luck, the whole left hand might be severed (and wouldn't that accomplishment put a certain haughty meat-cleaver in its place!). Unfortunately, the hand had jerked down instinctively to shove the salami and rye bread under the pillow. The knife clattered to the floor, content—but not happy—with a tip of the fourth finger and a sliver of pinky.

"If you don't open this door right now, this instant, this second," Mrs. Nagenbeck announced through the keyhole which she had pressed into service as a megaphone, "I will kick it down, I will break it down." Having achieved Ossa, she cast about for Pelion. "I will smash it and charge you for a door, two hinges and whatever woodwork is damaged. Not to mention the food you got in there and you're making unhygienic by touching. Open the door, you Mr. Bommer!"

He shoved the knife under the pillow after the food and jerked a blanket over them all. Then, recapping the medicine bottle, he walked toward the door sucking his bleeding fingers and perspiring insanely.

"Juzza second," he begged, the words clotting in his mouth.

"Then there's the lock," Mrs. Nagenbeck brooded. "A good lock today costs four, five, six dollars. And where's the labor costs I pay to the carpenter for his work in putting it on? If I have to break this door, if I have to crash my own..."

Her voice died into a curious mumble. Irving Bommer heard two sounds like the anticipatory wheezes of a locomotive before he managed to unlock the door.

Mrs. Nagenbeck stood there in her lavender dressing gown, her brows knit and her papery nostrils flared.

The salami! With her boarding-house experience, she could probably track it to the correct corner of the pillow by aroma alone.

"What a funny..." Mrs. Nagenbeck began uncertainly, hostile lines leaving her face with much regret. "What a strange smell! Such an unusual odor—so peculiar, so—Oh, you poor boy, Mr. Bommer—you hurt?"

He shook his head, bewildered by the completely alien expression on her face. It wasn't anger, yet it certainly looked dangerous. He retreated into the room. Mrs. Nagenbeck followed him, her voice experimenting with various sounds and winding up with something mighty like a coo.

"Let me see the hurt fingers, the ripped part, the scratch, the bruise," she said shyly, pulling his left hand from his mouth with sufficient force to loosen five teeth. "Ooooh, does it hurt? You got iodine antiseptic or mercurochrome peroxide antiseptic? And a styptic pencil antiseptic? And gauze bandages for wrapping and dressing?"

Overcome by her startling shift of mood, Irving Bommer indicated the medicine chest with his nose.

She continued to make the strange, embarrassing noises as she dressed the wound, for all the world like a saber-tooth purring. Every once in a while, when her lifted eyes met Irving Bommer's, she smiled with a quick exhalation. But when, holding his hand up for a last inspection, she suddenly planted a lingering, groaning kiss in the palm, he became frightened.

He strode to the door, pulling Mrs. Nagenbeck by the precious hand. "Thanks a lot," he told her. "But it's late. I have to be getting to bed."

Mrs. Nagenbeck let go. "You want me to leave," she stated reproachfully.

At his nod, she swallowed, smiled bravely and walked out sideways, practically scraping the buttons off his vest.

"Don't work too hard," her sad face was saying as he closed the door upon it. "Someone like you shouldn't have to kill themselves to death working at a job. Good night, Mr. Bommer."

—|—

The lush purple of the little vial winked at him from the bed. The love potion! He had spilled a drop in his palm and, after his fingers were cut, had involuntarily clenched his hand. The gypsy woman had said that a drop of his blood mixed with a drop of the potion would make that drop his very own. Evidently that had happened: Mrs. Nagenbeck was aflame. He shuddered. Mrs. Nagenbeck. What kind of a love philter—

But what was sauce for Mrs. Nagenbeck undoubtedly would be sauce for other, younger, more desirable females. Like that lazy-eyed girl behind the cutlery counter, or the sparkling minx in salad bowls and baking dishes.

A knock on the door.

"It's only me, Hilda Nagenbeck. Look, Mr. Bommer, I got to thinking, salami and rye bread are pretty dry. Besides, they make you thirsty for something to drink. So I brought up two cans of beer."

He smiled as he opened the door and took the two cans. Time had not stood still with Mrs. Nagenbeck. What had been a-budding in her eyes before was now in glorious bloom. Her soul stood on her lashes and waved at him.

"Thank you, Mrs. Nagenbeck. Now, go right to bed. Go ahead."

She nodded quickly, obediently, and plumped down the passage, casting a yearning glance backward with every step.

It was with straighter, prouder shoulders that Irving Bommer applied the requisite opening pressure to a can of beer. Mrs. Nagenbeck was not much, certainly; but she pointed the way to a more interesting future.

He was handsome now—to any woman with a mildly sensitive nose.

Only trouble, there was so little of the stuff; the bottle was terribly small. Who knew how long the effect lasted? And he had so much to catch up with.

As he finished the second can of beer, much, much pleased with himself, he suddenly hit on the solution. Beautiful! And so simple.

First, he poured the contents of the medicine bottle into the empty can. Then, stripping off the bandages, he inserted his two injured fingers into the triangular bottle and scraped the newly formed scar tissue off against the raw metal. In a moment, there was a satisfactory flow of blood into the can, a flow which he stimulated by repeated scrapings.

When he felt he had the mixture as before, he shook the can a few times, dressed his now messy fingers and poured the whole noisome collation into the large, economy-size bottle of aftershave lotion he had purchased a week before. The bottle was fitted with an atomizer.

"Now," he said, as he tossed the knife and rye bread to the bureau, turned out the lights, crawled into bed and began munching on the salami, "now, let them watch out for Irving Bommer!"

—|—

He forgot to set the alarm and was awakened only by the ablutionary matins of the man in the room next door. "Twenty minutes to dress and get to work," he muttered as he threw the sheets apart and leaped to the wash basin. "No breakfast!"

But Mrs. Nagenbeck met him downstairs with an arch smile and a tray. Disregarding his protestations, she insisted he have "at least a bite to chew on in his mouth."

As he frantically forked the scrambled eggs from the soup bowl to his face, jerking his head to avoid Mrs. Nagenbeck's furtive kisses like the human target in a baseball-throwing sideshow, he wondered what had happened to his prim, forbidding landlady since the last time he'd seen her.

The last time he'd seen her...

Seizing the opportunity of Mrs. Nagenbeck's departure for a jar of caviar ("so you can have a spread on your bread with your coffee"), he pounded back upstairs to his room.

He ripped off his shirt and tie and, after thinking a bit, his undershirt. He pointed the nozzle of the atomizer at himself and squeezed the rubber bulb. He sprayed his face, his hair, his ears, his neck, his chest, his back, his arms, his navel. He even pushed the nozzle under his belt and sprayed around in a complete circle. When his hand began to knot with the unaccustomed exercise, he desisted at last and began to dress. The odor almost sickened him, yet he felt amazingly light-hearted.

Before he left the room, he shook the huge bottle. Still at least nine-tenths full. So there was another bargain he was making pay off. Before he was through, a lot of things and a lot of people were going to pay off!

The gypsy woman was standing in front of her bedraggled shop when he passed. She started to smile, stopped abruptly, and shouted a slippery phrase at her children, who ran inside. Backing into the store, she held her nose and wailed at him lugubriously: "You use too moch! You not suppose use all at wance!"

He tipped her a careless salute as he hurried on. "I didn't. There's lots more where this came from!"

His train was crowded, but he saw a vacant seat from the subway platform. He hit the knot of people clustered about the opening doors and literally untied them. Dodging recklessly into the train, almost singing with self-confidence and happiness, he squeezed past two fairly determined women, expertly kicked a brisk, old fellow in the shins to distract him, and was sliding into the seat when the train started. The lurch threw him off balance and enabled a porcelain-faced young lady of twenty or twenty-five—a rank outsider—to slip in under his probing posterior. By the time he had straightened and turned around, she was grinning at him smugly with a tiny but extremely red mouth.

If there is one thing an habitual subway rider learns, it is that Kismet underground is forever inscrutable, seating some and placing others always among the standees. Irving Bommer reached for the overhead bar, adjusting himself to the hard subway law of supply and demand.

The girl's face was twisted as if she were about to cry. She shook her head in spasms, staring up at him and biting her lips. She was breathing very loudly.

She stood up suddenly and indicated the seat with a courtly gesture. "Won't you take it, please?" she asked with a voice positively awash in milk and honey. "You look tired."

Irving Bommer sat down, acutely conscious of the heads turning in their direction. His neighbor, a somewhat plump nineteen, began sniffing and slowly, incredulously, moved her shining eyes from her historical novel to his face.

The girl who had given him her seat swung in close, though all the other standing passengers were leaning the other way just then. "I'm positive I met you somewhere before," she began with some uncertainty, then more and more rapidly as if she were remembering the words: "My name is Iphigenia Smith and, if you tell me yours, I just know I'll be able to recall exactly where we were introduced."

Irving Bommer sighed deep in his inmost psyche and leaned back. Biology and he had at last developed a rendezvous.

He led a small parade to the employees' entrance of Gregworth's Department Store. Rendered inconsolable by the refusal of the elevator operator to admit customers into the rickety elevator intended solely for personnel, they clustered about the shaft and watched him ascend as if he were Adonis and the winter solstice were approaching.

Humphries caught him scribbling his name on the sign-in pad. "Seven minutes late. Not too good, Bommer, not too good. We want to make an effort to get in on time, don't we? We want to make a real effort."

"Forgot to set the alarm," Irving Bommer mumbled.

"We aren't going to use that one, are we? Let's be adults in Gregworth's; let's face up to our mistakes and try to do better." The buyer pulled his perfectly knotted tie just a fraction tighter and frowned. "What in the world is that smell? Bommer, don't you bathe?"

"A woman spilled something on me in the subway. It'll wear off."

Having made good his escape, he wended his way past pots, pans, and pressure cookers to dicers, graters, and peelers, where he took up his regular station. He had just begun to set the counter up for the day's business when the gong announced that the outside world was now able to enter and secure Gregworth's Greater Bargains.

A hand sliding tremulously across his lapels distracted him. Doris, the blonde, beautiful salad bowls and baking dishes, was leaning across his counter and caressing him. Doris! She who usually made loud, unpleasant sounds whenever he aimed a bright cliché at her!

He grabbed her chin. "Doris," he said sternly, "do you love me?"

"Yes," she breathed. "Yes, darling,
yes
. More than
any
—"

He kissed her twice, first quickly, then with more savor as he observed she didn't leap away, but moaned deliriously instead and writhed a whole row of projecting nickel-plated graters out of position.

Fingers snapping loudly made him jerk back and push her away.

"Now, now, now, now," said Humphries, glaring at Irving Bommer with a slight uncertainty. "We have a time and a place for everything, don't we? Let's be businesslike; we have customers to wait on. Let's attend to private matters after closing time."

The girl shot the buyer a look of purest hatred, but at Irving's dismissing wave and Humphries's further finger-snaps, she turned away slowly, saying in a low, insistent tone: "I'll wait for you after work, Irving darling. I'll go home with you. Everywhere, forever..."

"Don't know what happened to that clerk," Humphries mused. "Used to be the steadiest salad bowls and baking dishes." He turned back to Irving Bommer, seemed to struggle with himself, then began mildly: "In any case, Bommer, let us not go off the deep end. Customers are coming up; let's start pushing graters, let's move our slicers." He picked up a bone handle attached to a long, twisted blade and flourished it at an early group of women shoppers congregated around Irving's counter. "The latest way to cut grapefruit, oranges, and melons, ladies. The only way. Why have old-fashioned straight and severe lines around your servings?" His voice, which had been contemptuous, soared away to contemplate the lotus: "With the new Hollywood Dream Slicer you cut your grapefruit, oranges, and melons easily and efficiently. No more losing valuable, vitamin-filled juices; no more melon stains on delicate lace tablecloths. And above all, you have attractive scalloped edges. Children love to eat interestingly cut grapefruit, oranges—"

"Is that what he's selling?" asked a huge woman with a musclebound jaw. Humphries nodded.

"Then I'll take one. If he gives it to me."

"I'll take two. Will he give me two?"

"Five! I want five. I asked first and you didn't hear me."

"Now, ladies," Humphries beamed. "Let's not push, let's not squabble. There are more than enough Hollywood Dream Slicers to go around. See, Bommer, see," he hissed, "what a little sales talk can do for us? Let's not miss one of these sales; let's hustle."