"You have? Then maybe you know what I'm talking about."
"Oh, yes." Ernie nodded again and smiled grimly. "The man in white?"
She laughed. "Exactly, the man in white. For a long time, I've thought
it was just too much bother for either of us to carry the milk home,
and the eggs and my yogurt too. So I decided to have the milkman that
Mr. Jones uses make deliveries. Mr. Jones brought him over half an hour
ago and it's all arranged. Four quarts a week, one dozen eggs, and
yogurt Tuesdays and Fridays."
* * * * *
The Invisible Being and his Coadjutor, backtracking for a checkup,
summarized the situation.
The latter said, "So he's already thrown away the Everlasting Cosmetic
Knife and the Water Splitter; he seems to be trying to reject the third
Little Gift and the first Big One, while he still isn't even conscious
of the other two Gifts."
"Cheer up," said the Invisible Being. "It's his life and he's doing
what he thinks best."
"Yes," the Coadjutor said, "but he doesn't know he's making these
decisions for his race as well as himself. Sometimes I think Galaxy
Center makes it too hard for chaps like him. For instance, that trick
of having the images on the box fade back to the old ones."
"Nonsense! We have to take all reasonable precautions that our
activities remain secret. He knew that the powder worked. He should
have had faith."
"Sometimes it takes a lot of faith."
"You're right, it does." The Invisible Being smiled his Cheshire smile.
"You feel a lot for these test subjects, don't you? That's fine, but
you've got to remember you can't accept the Gifts for them; that's one
thing they have to do themselves, however long they take about it.
Which reminds me, I think we ought to set up a recorder here to report
the final outcome of the test to Galaxy Center."
"Good idea."
"And cheer up, I say. This test isn't over yet and our featherless
biped isn't necessarily licked. If he thinks to link up the third
Little Gift with the two Big Ones, he has a pretty sweet setup for
making psychic progress--and his race will be Galactic Citizens in a
jiffy."
"You're right."
"Moreover, it stands to reason he's soon going to become aware of the
Great Gift, and that generally gives a person a jolt and makes him
think seriously about other things."
"True enough--though I still have the feeling you intend some sardonic
trick in conjunction with the Great Gift. Are you sure you're not
planning to leave some other setup here along with the recorder? I
notice you've got a spare Juxtaposer in the ship and it bothers me."
"That, dear Coadjutor, is my business. Whatever I do, it won't
interfere in any way with the fairness of the tests."
"Sometimes I think the tests are _too_ fair," the Coadjutor observed.
"I'd like to be able to ease them up a bit in special cases."
"Confidentially, my friend, so would I."
* * * * *
The Great Gift announced itself to Ernie next morning at 7:53 sharp,
when the Special slowed to forty miles an hour to swing past the
platform on which he was waiting for the Express.
One moment he was standing morning-weary on the thick wooden planks,
looking down through the quarter-inch gaps between them at the cinders
five feet below, vaguely conscious of a woman's white-polka-dotted
black skirt on one side of his field of vision and a man's brown shoes
and briefcase to the other.
Next moment he was in a small cab under which steel rails were
vanishing at an alarming speed, and way ahead he could just make out
the platform on which he was standing, and something was hurting his
head and he was slumping forward and everything was darkening and the
cab was leaping forward more swiftly still.
The third moment he was back on the platform, running furiously to get
off it. He didn't care who yelled at him or whom he bumped, so long as
it didn't slow him down. The people were just blurs anyway and soon
he was beyond them. He took in two strides the short flight of wooden
steps leading down off the platform proper and spurted the last sixty
feet to the stairs leading down to street level. There he stumbled,
recovered himself, and chanced a hasty backward look.
There was a tall man at his heels, hugging a briefcase and panting
hard. Then, beyond the tall man, he saw the platform rear up like a
wooden caterpillar, spilling people against the bright gray morning
sky. There was a cosmic crunch and the battered Special, still
coming strong, burst through the upreared platform in a blossoming
broken-matchstick crown of planks and beams--and big blue sparks where
a writhing power wire, snagged by the uprearing platform, was grounding
against the first car.
Ernie ducked his head and plunged down the steps ahead.
(That was how I came to meet Ernie Meeker. I was the tall man. As
you can imagine, it's quite strange to be standing in a huddle of
fresh-washed morning commuters and have the one beside you close
his eyes and slump a little and then take off like a bat out of
hell--without a word spoken or a thing happened to explain it. I
started to laugh, but then I got the funniest feeling of curiosity
and terror and I took off after him. It saved my life.
(Afterward, Ernie and I went back to help with the ghastliness, but
pretty soon there were more than enough trainmen, firemen, police, and
what not, and we got chased off. We had a couple of drinks together and
met a few times after and that's how I got some of this story. But my
chief sources of information I am not permitted to disclose.)
* * * * *
As the Invisible Being had predicted, Ernie's first brush with the
Great Gift gave him a considerable jolt, though he didn't suspect at
first that it was a permanent gift.
He analyzed what had happened, quite reasonably, I believe, as a case
of second sight. Somehow his mind had been projected into the brain
of the motorman of the Special just at the moment the latter had his
stroke (the final official explanation too) and blindly put on more
speed instead of reducing it for the approaching curve and station. His
second sight saved his life by getting him off the platform before the
Special jumped the tracks and ploughed through it.
It certainly gave a jolt to Ernie's habit patterns, as it temporarily
did of a great many other people. He started driving his car to work,
for one thing, and he took to drinking regularly in the evenings,
though not excessively as yet.
He also had the feeling, which he did not try to analyze, that his
miraculous escape marked the end of the "strange weeks" in his life,
when he'd had such odd illusions or been the victim of such odd
circumstances; and, true enough, that first week or so there were no
recurrences of his chillingly weird experiences.
* * * * *
But jolts have their infallible Law of Diminishing Effects.
After a few days, Ernie found the traffic and parking problems as
nervous and wearisome as ever and he grew envious of the snug commuters
meditating luxuriously in their electric coaches. Come the first
morning of the third week and he was standing on the rebuilt platform,
studying the new planks, ties and rails with a pleasantly morbid
interest.
Vivian was not in her accustomed seat nor on the train, as far as he
could tell, which did not surprise him, though it disappointed him
sharply; the Panther Princess had a stronger hold on his feelings, or
at least on his imagination, than he'd realized.
But Verna was on the train home all right; in fact, she gave a small
whoop of pleasure when she spotted him. And he had barely sat down
beside her when who should come prowling smoothly along but Vivian in a
charcoal version of her tailored black armor.
Ernie jumped up and blurted out introductions. Vivian accepted his
seat with a certain deliberateness and with a smile that seemed to
Ernie to say, "So I'm his morning light-badinage girl, but this
is the girl Mr. Meeker goes home with. It's another instance of
'black-glasses' behavior, don't you think? He puts her on whenever he
gets afraid he's getting attractive."
* * * * *
The two women started to chat easily enough, however, and shortly Ernie
got over his confusion and, smiling down at them from where he swayed
in his aisle with his hand lightly touching the back of the seat ahead,
was even thinking quite smugly that here in one seat, by gosh, were the
woman he wanted and the woman who wanted him. Very interesting to be
the man in the middle.
Just at that moment, the power came back to him that made everything
feverishly real, expanding his center of attention to his visual
horizons, and this time it was only a prelude, for a second gateway
opened behind the first--a window into all human hearts and minds, the
power of human insight fantastically sharpened and enlarged. He could
"read minds," or at least he knew the motives--the core of values and
consciousness--of any person he cared to look at. Most especially, he
knew the motives of Verna and Vivian almost as if he _were_ them.
The big thing about Vivian was her fear--no, her conviction, that she
wasn't attractive. Every glance her way knocked a hole in the armor of
artificial attractiveness she built around herself, and all the hours
she devoted to perfecting it, even the desperate worship she lavished
on her body, were all utterly lost. A simple relationship with another
human being was unthinkable; her armor got in the way and under her
armor she knew she was worthless. A man was sometimes attracted to her
armor--never to herself!--but as soon as he started to scrutinize it,
it began to tarnish and crumple.
She hoped that other people, men especially, had a trace of her own
weaknesses, and she sniped away at them constantly to get under the
armor to find out. Ernie was one in a long series of such men. She was
actually in love with him, but only as one loves a dream, not the real
Ernie at all. Physically he was disgusting to her, like most men.
* * * * *
Verna, on the other hand, had absolute confidence that she was
sufficiently attractive for all practical purposes. She wasn't in love
with Ernie at all. She wanted to make an intellectual conquest of him,
add him to her private Brain Trust, her cultured entourage that won Mr.
Abrusian's seldom-tendered admiration and broke Miss Minkin's heart,
and finally get Ernie to join the Working Boys' Front. He was one of
her projects. If it became tactically necessary during her campaign,
she knew that Ernie would be only too happy to jump in bed with her,
food-triangles and all.
Now in other circumstances (who really knows?), Ernie might have found
the courage to accept Vivian and Verna as they really were and work
on from there, ruthlessly discarding his false pictures of them--and
of himself. He might conceivably have found the strength to accept
all people not as shadowy projections of himself, fabricated targets
of his desires and aversions, puppets in his private chess games and
circuses, but as complete persons with inexhaustible surprises and
contradictions, each a microcosm, a universe-in-little with his or her
own earth and stars, spaceflight and crawling, heaven and hell.
But under the present circumstances, Ernie was confused. His knowledge
of the real Vivian spoiled completely the titillating picture of the
Panther Princess, who might submit to him contemptuously in the end--he
needed that sex idol more than he needed truth. As for Verna, her
stalwart self-reliance and her accurate appraisal of his own motives
and possible future behavior were both unbearably humiliating to him.
And the delight of really knowing people was completely outweighed, in
his tired spirit, by the thought of the lifetime of work that would be
involved in adjusting himself to this new knowledge. It was so much
more comfortable to work with stereotypes.
The Express was slowing for his station. Both girls were looking at him
puzzledly.
"Good-by, Verna. Good-by, Vivian," he said in a set sort of voice.
"This is where I get off."
He moved stiffly toward the door. They watched him go, and turned to
each other with a frown.
* * * * *
That evening marked the beginning of Ernie's serious drinking. He never
saw either of the V-girls again. He took his car or the bus to work;
then, for a short period, he took taxicabs, then he lost his job and
was working in another part of the city. He became mixed up with a
number of other women and crowds, but they are not part of this or any
story.
Among other things, his drinking eventually completely confused his
memories of abnormal personal powers with his entirely normal illusions
of alcoholic ones. And it also seemed to be blotting out the former.
Once, at a party, he bet twenty dollars that his eyes glowed in the
dark. Next morning he was relieved to discover, after making several
anxious phone calls, that he'd lost his bet.
When he finally pulled out of it, some five years later, because of a
growing aversion to liquor that he only understood later, the two Big
Gifts of Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were gone forever.
The Great Gift had a more durable lodgment in him. From his alcoholic
years, he brought hazy memories of accidents avoided because of sudden
wrong-ended visions of onrushing cars, alley rollings missed because
he'd seen himself reeling along a block away through the eyes of
lounging hoodlums. Now, sober again, he had a clear confirmation of it
when he left a banquet on a trumped-up excuse because of a disturbing
vision of inexplicable rodlike shapes--and read the next day that a
hundred of the guests, of whom four finally died, had come down with
bacterial food poisoning. Another time, hiking in dry woods, he'd
smelled smoke that his companions couldn't--and persuaded them to turn
back, avoiding a disastrous flash fire that broke out soon afterward.
He had to admit to himself that he certainly seemed to have the gift of
second sight, warning him against threats to his life.
"All right," he told himself, "so forget it. Gifts are upsetting. Even
as a kid, you sweated more about your birthday presents than you ever
got fun out of them."
Our story has already jumped five years; now it must jump twenty.
Ernie is living with his sister again; while he was drinking, they
pulled apart, and now they've once more pulled together. They're having
dinner, have arrived at dessert, a big piece of chocolate cake each
with satiny thick creamy frosting and filling.
Ernie looks at his piece--and sees himself climbing stairs and
clutching at his heart. He thinks of warning his sister, but she's
already halfway through her piece. Then she goes on and eats Ernie's.
* * * * *
Ernie's sister didn't get food poisoning, she only got fat, but the
incident of the chocolate cake was for Ernie the beginning of a series
of peculiar food revulsions and diet experiments that eventually made
Ernie instead of his sister the family yogurt-fiend and a regular
customer of his old acquaintance, Herman, the health-food manufacturer.
Herman had to admit that Ernie had cooked himself up a pretty good
longevity diet for an amateur, though there were some items in it that
made the old man shake his head--and he always asserted that Ernie was
passing up a good thing in Soybean Mush.
Ernie got his diet tailored to fit his tastes and stuck to it. He had
a strong suspicion of what had happened, though he tried not to think
about it too often: that his gift of second sight had taken to warning
him of the longer-range dangers to his existence; after all, chocolate
cake can be as deadly as atomic bombs in the long run.
More years passed. Friends and relatives began to remark quietly to
each other that his sister was aging faster. Ernie, they had to admit,
was a remarkably well-preserved old gent. Ironic, considering what a
drunk he'd been and what strange junk he insisted on eating now.
One day Ernie's self-styled health diet began to pall on him. It didn't
revolt him; it merely left him unsatisfied, yet with no yearning for
any particular food he could think of. He lived with this yearning for
some weeks, meditating on it and trying to guess its nature. Finally he
had an inspiration. He headed for Mr. Willis' drugstore.
The bent, silvery-haired man greeted him eagerly; somehow there was a
special warmth about the friendships Ernie had made during the "strange
weeks" (Verna and Vivian excepted) that put them in a different class
from any other of his human relationships.
* * * * *
"Now what can I give you, Ernie?" Mr. Willis asked. "Anything in the
place within reason."
"I'll tell you, Bert I'd like to go back in your dispensary--you with
me, if you want--and just shop around."
"That's a sort of screwy idea, Ernie. I couldn't sell you any narcotics
or sleeping pills, of course--well, maybe a few sleeping pills."
"I wouldn't want any."
"What's the idea, Ernie? Getting interested in chemistry in your
old ... You know, Ernie, you just don't look your years."
"Secret of mine. Yes, in a way I've got interested in chemistry."
"Won't talk, eh? I remember, when I first met you, I tagged you for an
evening inventor. Well, come on back and shop around. Just don't ask me
for _elixer vitae_, _aurum potabile_, or ground philosophers' stone."
"Not unless I see 'em."
Afterward, Bert Willis used to say it was one of the most mystifying
experiences of his life. For a good half a day, Ernie Meeker studied
the rows of jars, canisters and glass-stoppered bottles, sometimes
lifting two down together and contemplating them, one in each hand, as
if he could weigh the difference. Often he'd take out a stopper and
sniff, and maybe, asking permission of Bert with a glance, take up a
dab of some powder and taste it.
"You know that game," Bert would say, "where someone goes out of the
room and you all decide on an object, or hide one, and he comes back
and tries to find it by telepathy or muscle-reading or something? That
was exactly the way Ernie was acting. Dog on a difficult scent."
A couple of times, especially when the customers came in, Bert wanted
to chase him out, except that Ernie was such a special friend and Bert
was so darn curious about it all himself.
In the end, Ernie made a good twenty purchases, including a mortar and
pestle and two poisons for which Bert made him sign, though the amounts
were less than a lethal dose.
"Actually none of the chemicals he bought were very dangerous," Bert
would say. "And none of them were terribly unusual. The thing about
them was that, put together, they just didn't make sense--as a medicine
or anything else. Let me see, there was sulphur, bismuth, a bit of
mercury, one of the sulfa drugs, a tiny packet of auric chloride,
and ... I had 'em all on a list once, but I've lost it."
After that, Ernie always mixed a little grayish paste in his cup of
yogurt at suppertime.
Ernie stopped aging altogether.
* * * * *
After his sister's coffin was lowered past the margins of green matting
into the ground, Ernie shook hands with the minister, walked Bert
Willis and Herman Schover to their car and told them he thought he'd
better drive home with some relatives who'd turned up. Actually he just
wanted to stay behind a while. It was a beautiful blue-and-white summer
day; the tidy suburban cemetery had caught his fancy, and now he felt
like a quiet stroll.
Ernie followed his little impulses these days. As he sometimes said, "I
figure I've got plenty of time. I just don't feel the pressure like I
used to."
The last car chugged away. Ernie stretched and started to stroll,
slowly, but not like an old man, now that he was alone. His hair had
grown whiter in the last few years and his face a little wrinkled, but
that was due to the very judicious use of silvering and theatrical
liner--people's comments about his youthfulness had gotten wearisome
and would, he knew, eventually become suspicious.
Keeping himself oriented by a white tower at the cemetery gate, he
arrived at an area that had no graves as yet, no trees either, just
lawn. He made his way to the center of it, where there was a gently
swelling hummock, and sat down in the warm crinkly grass, resting
his back against the slope. The sky was lovely, enough clouds to be
interesting, but a great oval of pure blue just overhead--a pear-shaped
gateway to space.
He felt no grief at his sister's death, only the desire to think a bit,
have a quiet look at his past and another at the great future.
Alone like this, he dared to face his fate for a moment and admit to
himself that, all wishful thinking aside, it really began to look as if
he were going to live forever, or at least for a very long time.
Live forever! That was a phrase to give you a chill, he told himself.
And what to do, he asked himself, with all that time?
Back in the "strange weeks," he'd have had little trouble in answering
that question--if only he'd known then what he did now and realized
what was being offered him. For, during his sober decades, Ernie had
gradually come to a shrewdly accurate estimate of what had happened to
him then. He thought of it in terms of having been offered six Gifts
and turned down five of them.
* * * * *
Back in the "strange weeks" and armed with the five rejected Gifts
(Page-at-a-Glance and Mind Reading were the only ones that counted,
though), he could easily have said, "Live forever by all means!
Increase your knowledge and understanding until your mind bursts or is
transfigured. Plunge forever into the unending variety of the Cosmos.
Open yourself to everything."
But now, equipped to travel only as a snail....
Still, even snails get somewhere. With forever to work with, even
four-words-at-a-glance gets you through many, many books. Patient
love and dispassionate thought give you human insight in the end, can
finally open the tightest shutter on the darkest human heart.
But that would take so very long and Ernie felt tired. Not old, just
tired, tired. Best simply to watch the soft clouds--the pear-shaped
gateway had become almost circular. To do anything but drift through
life, a stereotype among stereotypes, was simply ... too ... much ...
work....
At that very moment, as if his thought had summoned the experience
into being, another scene filmed over the blue sky and white clouds
above him. The sudden humming in his ears--a kind of "audible
silence"--informed him that his second sight was at work, warning him
of some deadly danger. But this was a more gentle instance of it,
for not all his consciousness jumped somewhere else. All through the
experience, he was still aware of himself leaning against the grassy
hummock, of the restful melancholy of the scene around him, and of the
sky overhead. The second scene only superimposed itself on the first.
He was poised many hundreds of miles above the Earth, a ghost-Ernie
immune to the airlessness and the Sun's untempered beams. At his back
was black night filled with stars. Below him stretched the granulated
dry brown of Earth's surface, tinged here and there with green, clumped
with white cloud, and everywhere faintly hazed with blue.
* * * * *
Up there in space with him, right at his elbow, so close that he could
reach out and touch it, was a tiny silver cylinder about as big as a
hazelnut, domed at one end, reflecting sunlight from one point in a way
that would have been blinding enough except that Ernie's ghost eyes
were immune to brightness.
As he reached out to examine it, the thing darted away from him as
if at some imperious summons, like a bit of iron jumping through a
magnetic field.
But in spite of its enormous acceleration, Ernie's ghost was able
to follow it in its downward plunge. It kept just ahead of his
outstretched fingertips.
The brown granules that were Earth's surface grew in size. The tiny
metal cylinder began to glow with more than reflected sunlight. It
turned red, orange, yellow and then blazing white as atmospheric
friction transformed it into a meteor.
Ernie's ghost, immune to friction and incandescence alike, followed it
as it dove toward its target--for even though Ernie had never heard of
a Juxtaposer and how it brought objects together, he had the feeling,
from the dizzy speed of the meteor's plunge, that it yearned for
something.
He knew most meteors vaporized or exploded, but this did not, even
when Earth's brown surface grew rivers and roads. Suddenly there was a
cloudbank ahead; then, in the white, there appeared an almost circular
hole toward the very center of which the meteorite plunged.
Everything was happening very fast now, but his ghost senses were able
to keep pace. As they plunged through the cloud-ring and the green
landscape below grew explosively, he saw the white tower, the trees,
the curving drives, and the clearing which was now the target.
There was still time to escape. Lying on the warm grass, with death
lancing down from the sky at miles a second, he had merely to roll over.
But it was simply ... too ... much ... work....
* * * * *
Elsewhere near Earth, a recorder sped toward Galaxy Center a message
which ended, "Six Gifts tendered, all finally refused. I will now sign
off and await pickup with one Juxtaposer."
A little later, a Receiver in Galaxy Center passed the message to a
Central Recorder, which filed it in the Starswarm 37 section with this
addition: "Spiritual immaturity of Terran bipeds indicated. Advise
against enlightenment and admission to Galactic citizenship. Test
subject humanely released."
* * * * *
Police, digging into the turf under Ernie's shattered head two days
later found the bright bullet, cold now, of course, and untarnished.
"Looks like silver!" one cop said, scratching his head. "Haven't I
heard somewhere that the Mafia use silver bullets? So bright, though."
Lieutenant Padilla, later on, lifting the bullet in his forceps to
re-examine it for rifling marks, had the same thought about its
brightness. By now, however, he knew it was not silver. (What alloy
was never satisfactorily determined. Actually it was made of the same
substance as the Everlasting Razor Blade.)
This time, although he still found no rifling marks, a tiny dull
stretch on the flat end of the cylinder caught his attention. He took
up a magnifier and examined it carefully.
A moment later, he put down the magnifier, snatched up the pocketbook
found on the dead man and rechecked some cards in it. The bullet
dropped from the forceps, rolled a few inches. The lieutenant sat back
in his chair, breathing a little hard.
"This is one for the books, all right!" he told himself. "I've heard
a lot of people, soldiers especially, talk about such bullets, but I
never expected to see one!"
For under the magnifying glass, finely engraved in very tiny letters,
he had read the words: ERNEST WENCESLAUS MEEKER.