"I mean about your eyes."
"My _eyes_?" It was almost a scream. "What about my eyes?"
"Don't shout, Ernie. I mean are they painful?"
"Painful? Why should they be painful?"
"I really don't know, Ernie." She was being very patient and calm.
"I mean did you _notice_ anything about them?" He was trying to be the
same without much success.
"Just that you put your hand up to them as if they hurt."
"Oh." Great relief. "Yes, they do smart a little. I guess I've been
using them too much. I'm putting some eye-drops in them now."
"Can I help you, Ernie? And shouldn't you see an
opto ... ocu ... optha ... I mean an eye doctor?"
Ernie answered "No" to both those questions, but of course it took a
lot more lying and improvising and general smoothing out before his
sister would even pretend to be satisfied and stop her general nagging
for the evening. She was getting uncomfortably cagy and curious lately,
addicted to asking such questions out of a blue sky as:
"Ernie, when we were visiting Uncle Fabius, did you actually believe
that you went out and bought gas?"
That one momentarily brought Ernie's stammer back, something which
hadn't troubled him for years.
And when she wasn't asking questions, her quiet studying of him for
long minutes was even more upsetting.
* * * * *
Next morning, on the way to the electric train, Ernie made a purchase
at the drugstore. When he sat down beside Vivian, she took one look at
him and gave a very deliberate-sounding hollow laugh.
"Black glasses!" she said. "I tell him he's attractive because he has
Flashing Eyes and within two days he's wearing black glasses. I suppose
I should have guessed it."
"But my eyes hurt," Ernie protested. "Sensitive to sunlight, I think."
He wished he could explain to her that he'd bought the glasses not only
in case he got caught out at night, but also to convince his sister he
hadn't been lying about sore eyes. He hadn't intended to wear them by
day and hardly knew why he'd put them on before joining Vivian.
"Spare me your rationalizations," she said. "Your motives are clear to
me, Ernie, and they happen to be very commonplace."
She leaned toward him and her voice, little more than a whisper, took
on an unexpectedly gloomy, chilling, hopeless tone.
"See these people all around us, Ernie? They're suicides, every one of
them. Day by day, in every way, they're killing themselves. People love
them, admire them, and it only makes them uneasy. They have abilities
and charms by the bushel--yes, they do, even that man with the wen on
his neck--and they only try to hide them. The spotlight turns their
way and they goof. They think they're running away from failure, but
actually they're running away from success."
Ernie looked at them, he couldn't help it, her voice made him, and the
ability of Page-at-a-Glance Reading chose that moment to come back to
him, only applied to faces instead of letters, and there seemed to be
another ability along with it, unclear as yet but frightening. He felt
like a very old detective scanning the lineup for the thousandth time.
The black glasses didn't interfere a bit--the dozens of faces in this
speeding electric car were suddenly as familiar as the court cards in
a deck--and he had the feeling that, like a bunch of pink pasteboards,
they were about to be hurled in his face.
My God, he asked himself, flinching, how could you go on living with
so many faces so close to you, so completely known?--each street you
turned into, each store you entered, each gathering you joined, another
deluge of unique features. Ugly, pretty, strong, weak--those words
didn't mean anything any more in this drenching of individuality he was
getting, and that showed no signs of stopping.
So he hardly heard Vivian saying, "And it's true of you, Ernie--in
spades, for your black glasses," and he hardly remembered parting from
her, and when he found himself alone he did something unprecedented for
him at that time of day--he went to a bar and drank two double whiskies.
* * * * *
The drinks brought the downtown landscape back to normal and stopped
the faces printing themselves on his mind, but they left him very
disturbed, and the suspiciousness with which he was treated at the
office didn't improve that, and Ernie began to wish for ordinariness
and commonplaceness in himself more than anything in the whole
world. If only, he silently implored, there were some way of junking
everything that had happened to him in the past few weeks--except maybe
Vivian.
Verna on the train home positively terrified him. She was unusually
talkative and engulfing this evening and he thought that if the
faces-forever feeling came to him just as she was baring her
food-triangles and all, he wouldn't be able to stand it. Somehow, it
didn't. Yet the very intensity of his distaste frightened him. Not for
the first time, the word "insanity" appeared in his mind, pulsing in
pale yellowish-green.
Half a block from home, passing his parked car (with an unconscious
little veer of avoidance), he spotted three figures in close conference
in front of his house: his sister, a man in dark blue--yes, Mr. Jones,
and ... a man in a white coat.
Almost before he knew it, he was in his car and driving away. He truly
didn't know what he was going to do, only that he was going to do it,
and found a trivial interest in trying to guess what it was going to
be. Whatever it was, it was going to dim that yellowish-green word,
decrease its type-size, make him a little more able to face the crisis
waiting him at home ... or somewhere.
He had a picture of himself getting on an airplane, another of renting
a room in a slum, another of stopping the car on a lonely, treeless
country road and getting out and looking up to the coldly glimmering
Milky Way--why?
That last picture was the most vivid, and when he realized he had
actually stopped his car, it was a moment before it would go away.
Then he saw he was parked in front of a demolished old apartment
building a few blocks from his home. Only yesterday he'd watched the
last wall going down. Now, just across the littered sidewalk from him,
the old cellar gaped, flimsily guarded in front by a makeshift rail
and surrounded on the other three sides by great hillocks of battered
bricks. Tomorrow probably (and in fact that was the way it happened) a
bulldozer would tumble them forward, filling the cellar with old bricks
and brick-dust, leveling the lot.
* * * * *
Now he knew what he was going to do. He unlatched the top over the
windshield and pushed the button. Slowly the top folded back over his
head, showing the smoke-dark sky, almost night. He hitched up a little
in the seat, reached inside his coat, pulled out the blue box he always
carried and pitched it into the dark pit across the sidewalk.
He was driving away almost before it landed. Yet through the hum of the
motor he thought he heard something call faintly, "Good-by."
The material of the filled-in cellar stayed fairly dry for many
years and the atom-bombing, when it finally came, created a partial
surface-seal of fused stone over that area. However, the bicarb box
fell apart in time; water reached it in little seepings and was
accumulated as a non-evaporating fuel-and-oxydizer mix. The amount of
this strange fluid grew and grew, eventually invading and filling a
now-blind section of the city's old sewer system.
Many tens of thousands of years after that, the buried pool was sensed
by the fuel-finders of a spaceship from up Polaris way, which had made
an emergency landing on the ruined planet. A well was drilled and the
mix pumped up and the centipedal Polarians, scuttling about the bleak
landscape, had a fine time trying to explain how such a sophisticated
fluid should occur in a seeming state of nature. However, they were
grateful to the Cosmic All-Father.
Long before that, Ernie had arrived home in something of a daze. He
told himself that he had cast off the most tangible element of his
"insanity," but he didn't feel any the better for it. In fact, he felt
distinctly apathetic when his sister confronted him and only with an
effort did he manage to brace himself for the trial he knew she had in
store for him.
"Ernie," she said hesitatingly, "I've come to a decision about
something--about a change in our arrangements here, to tell you the
truth--and I've gone ahead with it without consulting you. I do hope
you won't mind."
"No," he said heavily, "I guess I won't mind."
"I'm doing it partly on Mr. Jones's advice," she added slowly. "As a
matter of fact he suggested it."