Nightmares & Geezenstacks (14 page)

I had my breath back and started climbing again. I called out Lamb’s name when I got near the door, but she didn’t answer. I went inside, but she wasn’t there.

The place was very empty. I poured myself a glass of the wine and went over to look at the picture I’d blocked out. It was all wrong; it didn’t mean anything. The lines were nice but they didn’t mean anything at all. I’d have to scrape the canvas and start over. Well, I’d done that before. It’s the only way you get anything, to be ruthless when something’s wrong. But I couldn’t start it tonight.

The tin clock said it was a quarter to eleven, still that wasn’t late. But I didn’t want to think so I decided to read a while. Some poetry, possibly. I went over to the bookcase. I saw Blake and that made me think of one of his simplest and best poems,
The Lamb
. It had always made me think of Lamb—“Little lamb, who made thee?” It had always given me, personally, a funny twist to the line, a connotation that Blake, of course, hadn’t intended. But I didn’t want to read Blake tonight. T. S. Eliot: “Midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium.” But it wasn’t midnight yet, and I wasn’t in the mood for Eliot. Not even Prufrock: “Let us go then, you and I, where the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table—” He could do things with words that I’d have liked to do with pigments, but they aren’t the same things, the same medium. Painting and poetry are as different as eating and sleeping. But both fields can be, and are, so wide. Painters can differ as greatly as Bonnard and Braque, yet both be great. poets as great as Eliot and Blake. “Little lamb, who—” I didn’t want to read.

And enough of thinking. I opened the trunk and got my forty-five caliber automatic. The clip was full; I jacked a cartridge into the chamber and put the safety catch on. I put it into my pocket and went outside. I closed the door behind me and started down the hill toward Hans Wagner’s studio.

I wondered, had the Chandlers stopped there to warn them? Then either Lamb would have hurried home—or, possibly, she might have gone on with the Chandlers, to their place. She could have figured that to be less obvious than rushing home. So, even if she wasn’t there, it would prove nothing. If she was, it would show that the Chandlers hadn’t stopped there.

I walked down the road and I tried to look at the crouching black beast of the hills, the yellow of the lights. But they added up to nothing, they meant nothing. Unfeeling, ungiving-to-feel, like a patient etherized upon a table. Damn Eliot, I thought; the man saw too deeply. The useless striving of the wasteland for something a man can touch but never have, the shaking of a dead geranium. As a madman. Little Lamb. Her dark hair and her darker eyes in the whiteness of her face. And the slender, beautiful whiteness of her body. The softness of her voice and the touch of her hands running through my hair. And Hans Wagner’s hair, yellow as that mocking moon.

I knocked on the door. Not loudly, not softly, just a knock.

Was it too long before Hans came?

Did he look frightened? I didn’t know. The planes of his face were nice, but what was in them I didn’t know. I can see the lines and the planes of faces, but I can’t read them. Nor voices.

“Hi, Wayne. Come in,” Hans said.

I went inside. Lamb wasn’t there, not in the big room, the studio. There were other rooms, of course; a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom. I wanted to go look in all of them right away, but that would have been crude. I wouldn’t leave until I’d looked in each.

“Getting a little worried about Lamb; she’s seldom out alone this late. Have you seen her?” I asked.

Hans shook his blond, handsome head.

“Thought she might have dropped in on her way home,” I said casually. I smiled at him. “Maybe I was just getting lonesome and restless. How about dropping back with me for a drink? I’ve got only wine, but there’s plenty of that.”

Of course he had to say, “Why not have a drink here?” He said it. He even asked me what I wanted, and I said a martini because he’d have to go out into the kitchen to make that and it would give me a chance to look around.

“Okay, Wayne, I’ll have one too,” Hans said. “Excuse me a moment.”

He went out into the kitchen. I took a quick look into the bathroom and then went into the bedroom and took a good look, even under the bed. Lamb wasn’t there. Then I went into the kitchen and said, “Forgot to tell you, make mine light. I might want to paint a bit after I get home.”

“Sure,” he said.

Lamb wasn’t in the kitchen. Nor had she left after I’d knocked or come in; I remember Hans’s kitchen door; it’s pretty noisy and I hadn’t heard it. And it’s the only door aside from the front one.

I’d been foolish.

Unless, of course, Lamb had been here and had gone away with the Chandlers when they’d dropped by to warn them, if they had dropped by.

I went back into the big studio with the skylight and wandered around for a minute looking at the things on the walls. They made me want to puke so I sat down and waited. I’d stay at least a few minutes to make it look all right. Hans came back.

He gave me my drink and I thanked him. I sipped it while he waited patronizingly. Not that I minded that. He made money and I didn’t. But I thought worse of him than he could possibly think of me.

“How’s your work going, Wayne?”

“Fine,” I said. I sipped my drink. He’d taken me at my word and made it weak, mostly vermouth. It tasted lousy that way. But the olive in it looked darker, more the color I’d had in mind. Maybe, just maybe, with the picture built around that color, it would work out.

“Nice place, Hans,” I said. “That skylight. I wish I had one.”

He shrugged. “You don’t work from models anyway, do you? And outdoors is outdoors.”

“Outdoors is in your mind,” I said. “There isn’t any difference.” And then I wondered why I was talking to somebody who wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I wandered over to the window—the one that faced toward my studio—and looked out of it. I hoped I’d see Lamb on the way there, but I didn’t. She wasn’t here. Where was she? Even if she’d been here and left when I’d knocked, she’d have been on the way now. I’d have seen her.

I turned. “Were the Chandlers here tonight?” I asked him.

“The Chandlers? No; haven’t seen them for a couple of days.” He’d finished his drink. “Have another?” he asked.

I started to say no. I didn’t. My eyes happened, just happened, to light on a closet door. I’d seen inside it once; it wasn’t deep, but it was deep enough for a man to stand inside it. Or a woman.

“Thanks, Hans. Yes.”

I walked over and handed him my glass. He went out into the kitchen with the glasses. I walked quietly over to the closet door and tried it.

It was locked.

And there wasn’t a key in the door. That didn’t make sense. Why would anyone keep a closet locked when he always locked all the outer doors and windows when he left? ‘

Little lamb, who made thee?

Hans came out of the kitchen, a martini in each hand. He saw my hand on the knob of the closet door.

For a moment he stood very still and then his hands began to tremble; the martinis, his and mine, slopped over the rims and made little droplets falling to the floor.

I asked him, pleasantly, “Hans, do you keep your closet locked?”

“Is it locked? No, I don’t, ordinarily.” And then he realized he hadn’t quite said it right and he said, more fearlessly, “What’s the matter with you, Wayne?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I took the forty-five out of my pocket. He was far enough away so that, big as he was, he couldn’t think about trying to jump me.

I smiled at him, instead. “How’s about letting me have the key?”

More martini glistened on the tiles. These tall, big, handsome blonds, they haven’t guts; he was scared stiff. He tried to make his voice normal. “I don’t know where it is. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But stay where you are. Don’t move, Hans.”

He didn’t. The glasses shook, but the olives stayed in them. Barely. I watched him, but I put the muzzle of the big forty-five against the keyhole. I slanted it away from the center of the door so I wouldn’t kill anybody who was hiding inside. I did that out of the comer of my eye, watching Hans Wagner.

I pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot, even in that big studio, was deafening, but I didn’t take my eyes off Hans. I may have blinked.

I stepped back as the closet door swung slowly open. I lined the muzzle of the forty-five against Hans’s heart. I kept it there as the door of the closet swung slowly toward me.

An olive hit the tiles with a sound that wouldn’t have been audible, ordinarily. I watched Hans while I looked into the closet as the door swung fully open.

Lamb was there. Naked.

I shot Hans and my hand was steady, so one shot was enough. He fell with his hand moving toward his heart but not having time to get there. His head hit the tiles with a crushing sound. The sound was the sound of death.

I put the gun back into my pocket and my hand was trembling now.

Hans’s easel was near me, his palette knife lying on the ledge.

I took the palette knife in my hand and cut my Lamb, my naked Lamb, out of her frame. I rolled her up and held her tightly; no one would ever see her thus. We left together and, hand in hand, started up the hill toward home. I looked at her in the bright moonlight. I laughed and she laughed, but her laughter was like silver cymbals and my laughter was like dead petals shaken from a madman’s geranium.

Her hand slipped out of mine and she danced, a white slim wraith.

Back over her shoulder her laughter tinkled and she said, “Remember, darling? Remember that you killed me when I told you about Hans and me? Don’t you remember killing me this afternoon? Don’t you, darling? Don’t you remember?”

Wanta hear how Flapjack saved the world from the Martians, huh? All right, partner. It happened on. the edge of the Mojave, just south of Death Valley. Me and Flapjack was…

“Flapjack,” I told him complainingly, “you ain’t worth a whoop no more since you done got rich. You’re too all-fired proud these days to be ploddin’ through the desert doing an honest day’s work. Ain’t yuh?”

Flapjack didn’t answer. He ignored me and looked ahead of him disgustedly at the sand, the dust, the little clumps of cactus. He didn’t have to answer; just his whole attitude made it plenty clear he wished we was back in Crucero, or maybe up in Bishop.

I frowned at him. “Sometimes,” I told him, “I think you was just never cut out for this, Flapjack. Oh, sure, you’ve spent most of your life in the desert and the mountains, just like I spent most of mine. And maybe you know ’em better than I do; I gotta admit it was you and not me that stumbled on that there last strike we made. But I still don’t think you like the desert and the hills.

“I think I got reason for sayin’ that, Flapjack. It’s the way you’ve acted ever since we got a few dollars in the poke from that strike. Now you don’t have to look hurt like that. You know the way you been carryin’ on ever since we got money in the bank. A real caution. Why as soon as we get into Bishop or maybe Needles, what do you do? You make a beeline for the nearest saloon, that’s what you do. Gotta let everybody in town know we got money to spend.”

Flapjack yawned and kicked up the dust underfoot. He didn’t mind my talking on and on, because you get to where you kind of like to hear somebody’s voice out in the desert, but he wasn’t paying no real attention to what I was saying. But I didn’t let that stop me. I laid it into him.

I said, “And you ain’t satisfied to spend our money in just one bar, neither. The minute you finish off a gallon of beer in one saloon, you head for the next. You’re gettin’ yourself talked about, Flapjack. But that don’t make no difference to you. In fact, like I said, you’re gettin’ yourself so all-fired proud you don’t care what anybody says about you.

“It ain’t as though we got so much money we can retire. If we tried livin’ in town permanent-like, we’d be flat broke in no time. Especially with the way you hang around in saloons and guzzle beer. Well, at least you don’t buy drinks for the house; guess you think on account of that I ain’t got no complaints comin’,”

Flapjack snorted at my words and stopped.

“Oh, you think we oughta make camp, huh?” I said. I let my eyes go around the landscape. “All right, I guess one place is as good as another. Ain’t no water within a dozen miles anyhow.”

I took the pack off Flapjack’s back and began to set up my little tent. I’d never packed a tent before I’d made my strike—or Flapjack had made it for me—but that hombre in the store had caught me in a weak moment with money in my pocket and he’d talked me into it. A piece of foofaraw, but it served Flapjack right for having to carry it.

Flapjack watched me for a minute and then ambled off to size up the possibilities of a little graze or such other grub as a burro can rustle up in the desert. I knew he wouldn’t wander far and that I didn’t have to watch him or hobble him, so I minded my own business and let him mind his.

It wasn’t no exaggeration, what I’d been telling him. He’d been acting up for days and the reason was plain to see. Flapjack wanted to get back to where he could get his ration of beer every night, and some good fancy feed to top it off with. Ever since he kicked over that rock and made the silver strike, he’s had credit in every bar in every town around here. He just walks in and the bartender fills a bucket with beer for him and he drinks it down, and then he ambles on to the next bar. He’s crazy about beer. Holds it pretty well, too.

Maybe I should never have made the arrangements, but, like I said, it was Flapjack that made the strike, so I thought it was only fair. Even if once in a while I regret it, like the time he got in the fancy place in Crucero by mistake and got out in the middle of the fancy dance floor and—well, you can’t expect a burro to know better than that, can you? And there weren’t any people dancin’ just then anyway so I don’t see what they made such a big fuss about. Funny thing, Flapjack never done anything like that in a place where he was welcome, and I sometimes wonder. Especially after what happened with the Martians, But we ain’t quite got to that yet.

Anyway I was just jawing at Flapjack; I was gettin’ just about ready for a trip to town myself, and maybe that’s why I was takin’ it out on him. I like a trip to town just as well as Flapjack does, only I ain’t there no length of time before I get fed up with all the noise and the folks and the buildings and sleeping in beds and I just got to get out and head for the hills again. That’s the only thing me and Flapjack really differ on; he’d rather stay longer.

I was makin’ supper half an hour later and Flapjack probably thought I didn’t see him go into the tent. He was scoutin’ around for something to steal. Flapjack’s the stealingest burro I ever did see. If he thinks it’s something I want, he’ll steal it quicker’n you can say “Holy hominy,” even if he don’t like it or want it himself. I recollect the time I was gettin’ tired of the way he’d swipe pancakes in the morning, so I cooked up a batch with lots of red pepper in them. You think: he’d let out a peep? Not Flapjack. He was so happy about getting away with swiping my pancakes that he didn’t care how awful they tasted.

Flapjack’s a caution, Flapjack is. But I started out to tell you about the Martians. Maybe I better.

It was coming on morning; let’s see now, just to be accurate—like, it must’ve been August 6 or maybe August 7, sometimes you lose track in the desert.

Anyway, I opened my eyes when I heard Flapjack bray, real indignant-like. I knew something was up; Flapjack doesn’t use that tone of bray unless. I stuck my head out of the tent just in time to see this here—well, balloon was what I thought it was at first—balloon on fire. Fire was shootin’ out from beneath it like crazy. I expected a big explosion any minute.

But it didn’t explode. The balloon settled down no more than maybe fifty feet away, and the flames died out.

“Holy hominy,” I said to myself and to Flapjack, “it must’ve blowed all the way from some fair somewheres.”

I crawled the rest of the way out of the tent, figurin’ on gettin’ over to where that thing had come down to investigate—like. I didn’t expect no folks to be there cause there wasn’t no basket slung underneath. And if there had been, both the basket and the folks in it would’ve been fried to a crisp, the way that thing had been spouting fire as it came down.

I’d plumb forgot about Flapjack. You can’t blame him for feeling kind of skittish, but instead of runnin’ away he’d backed up toward the tent. And when he heard me movin’ behind him, he let go with his hind hoofs real quick. I don’t think he done it on purpose.

But that’s all I remembered for a while.

When I woke up again, it was good and light. I must’ve been out at least an hour, could have been two. I put my hand up to my head and groaned and then, sudden, I remembered that balloon. I staggered up to my feet and looked over at it.

That balloon wasn’t no balloon. I seen one balloon back in Missouri at a fair and I seen pictures of other ones, and this thing, whatever it was, wasn’t no balloon. I’ll guarantee you that.

Besides, whoever heard of anybody being
inside
a balloon?

Maybe I shouldn’t say
anybody
, I should say
anything
, on account of the critters that was dartin’ in and out of a door in the side of that thing sure wasn’t ordinary folks. First thing that come to my mind was maybe it was something from a circus; they have the damnedest freaks and animals—and contraptions, too—at a circus. Only I couldn’t decide whether these things was freaks or animals. They was somewhere in between.

Anyhow, these critters was dartin’ in and out of the big ball that I’d taken for a balloon, sometimes on their back legs, sometimes on all fours. On two legs, they was about four feet high, and on four they was only knee-high to a heifer, on account of their legs—and arms, if their front legs was arms—was so short. They was carryin’ all sorts of funny devices which they was settin’ up on the desert just about halfway between me and that ball-contraption they went in and out of. And three of ’em swarmed around puttin’ together what the others brought ’em.

Then I noticed Flapjack. He was standin’ right near ’em and didn’t look afraid at all. Just curious, like any burro is.

Well, I got up my courage and meandered over that way and took a look at the thing they was workin’ on, but I couldn’t make nothing of it. I said, “Hullo,” and they didn’t answer me and didn’t pay no more attention to me than if 1 was a prairie dog.

So I went around ’em, keepin’ my distance, and went up to the side of this ball and reached up and touched it. Holy hominy! It was made out of metal as smooth and hard as the barrel of a Colt and it was as big as a two-story house.

One of the funny-lookin’ little critters came along and shooed me away, kinda waving a thing in his hand that looked something like a flashlight. I had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t no flashlight and I wasn’t too curious, just then, to find out what would happen if he did more than wave it at me, so I got. I went back about twenty feet or so and watched.

Pretty soon they seemed to have finished putting together whatever it was they’d been working on. Flapjack was standing only a few feet away from it by now, and I started to wander up closer but one of ’em waved a flashlight at me again and I got back.

Two of ’em stood there on their hind legs pullin’ levers and twistin’ knobs. There was a kind of loud-speaker on top of it, like you used to see on old-fashioned phonographs. Suddenly the loud-speaker said: “It should be correctly adjusted now, Mandu.”

You could have knocked me down with a pebble. Here were these things looking like they’d escaped from a zoo and they had a talking machine of some kind or other. I sat down on a rock and stared at the loud-speaker.

“It would seem so,” the loud-speaker said. “Now if this terrestrial has the type of mentality that we have deduced, we should be able to communicate.”

All of the critters walked away from the device except one and he looked direct at Flapjack and said, “Greetings.”

“Greetings, yourself,” I said. “Flapjack’s a burro, so how’s about talking to me?”

“Will one of you,” said the loud-speaker, “please attempt to stop that domesticated creature over there from making his fantastic noises?”

Flapjack hadn’t been makin’ any noise that I could hear. But a flashlight got waved at me so I shut up to see what’d happen.

“I assume,” said the loud-speaker, “that you are the dominant intelligence of this planet. Greetings from the inhabitants of Mars.”

A funny thing about that there loud-speaker; something makes me remember every dang word it said, just like it said ’em, even when I still don’t rightly know what all the fancier words mean.

While I was tryin’ to figure the answer to what they’d said, danged if Flapjack didn’t beat me to the draw. He opened his mouth, showed his teeth and brayed real hearty.

“Thank you,” said the loud-speaker. “And in answer to your question, this is a sonic telepathor, It, in a manner of thinking, broadcasts my thoughts and they are reproduced in the mind of the listener in the language which he speaks and understands. The sounds you seem to hear are not the exact sounds that come from the speaker; it emits an abstract sound pattern which your subconscious, with the aid of the carrier wave, hears as expression in your own language. It is not selective, many creatures speaking many tongues would all understand what I am thinking. Our adjustment consisted in tuning the receiver part, which is selective, to the particular pattern of your individual intelligence.”

“You’re crazy,” I yelled. “Why don’t you fix that danged thing so it can understand what I say?”

“Please keep that animal quiet, Yagarl,” said the loud-speaker. Flapjack looked at me over his shoulder reproachfully. That didn’t worry me. But one of the critters with flashlights waved it at me again and that did. And anyway the speaker was blaring again and I wanted to hear what it said so I listened.

“We of Mars had the same difficulty,” it was saying. “Happily, we have been able to solve the problem by substituting robots for domesticated animals. Obviously, however, you have a different situation. Through the lack of suitable hands, or even tentacles, you have found it necessary to domesticate one of the lower orders which is so equipped.”

Flapjack brayed briefly and the loud-speaker said, “Naturally you wish to know the purpose of our visit. We wish your advice in solving a problem that is vital to us. Mars is a dying planet. Its water, its atmosphere, its mineral resources, are all practically exhausted. If we had been able to develop interstellar travel, we might seek an unoccupied planet somewhere in the galaxy. Unfortunately we have not; our ships will take us only to other planets in the solar system and only the discovery of an entirely new principle would enable us to reach the stars. We have not found even a clue to that principle.

“In the solar system, yours is the only planet—besides Mars—that can support Martian life. Mercury is too hot, Venus has no land surface and an atmosphere poisonous to us. The force of gravity of Jupiter would crush us and all of its moons are—like yours—airless, The outer planets are impossibly cold.

“So we are faced with the necessity, if we wish to survive, to move to Earth—peaceably if you submit; forcibly if we must use force. And we have weapons that can destroy the population of Earth within days.”

“Just a minute,” I yelled. “If you think for a minute that you can—”

The critter who had been aiming a flashlight at me lowered it at my knees and, as I started toward the one who’d been operating the speaker contraption, he pushed a button. My knees suddenly went rubber and I fell down. Also I shut up.

My legs just didn’t work at all. I had to use my arms to get to a sitting position so I could see what was going on.