[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction February 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
No doubt whatever about it, I had the Indian
sign on me ... my comfortably untidy world had
suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!
When I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten
down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which
had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown
temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but
according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got
dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my
wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.
What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed
the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The
ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the
place looked wife-deserted.
It had been a bad day; I had forgotten to wind the alarm clock, so I'd
had to hurry to make a story conference at one of the TV studios I
write for. I didn't notice the impending rain storm and had no umbrella
when I reached the sidewalk, to find myself confronted with an almost
tropical downpour. I would have turned back, but a taxi came up and a
woman got out, so I dashed through the rain and got in.
"Madison and Fifty-fourth," I said.
"Right," said the driver, and I heard the starter grind, and then go
on grinding. After some futile efforts, he turned to me. "Sorry, Mac.
You'll have to find another cab. Good hunting."
If possible, it was raining still harder. I opened my newspaper over
my hat and ran for the subway: three blocks. Whizzing traffic held
me up at each crossing and I was soaked when I reached the platform,
just in time to miss the local. After an abnormal delay, I got one
which exactly missed the express at Fourteenth Street. The same thing
happened at both ends of the crosstown shuttle, but I found the rain
had stopped when I got out at Fifty-first and Lexington.
* * * * *
As I walked across to Madison Avenue, I passed a big excavation where
they were getting ready to put up a new office building. There was the
usual crowd of buffs watching the digging machines and, in particular,
a man with a pneumatic drill who was breaking up some hard-packed clay.
While I looked, a big lump of it fell away, and for an instant I was
able to see something that looked like a chunk of dirty glass, the size
of an old-fashioned hatbox. It glittered brilliantly in the sunlight,
and then his chattering drill hit it.
There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on
his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the
moment of the explosion--if so feeble a thing can be called one--I
felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my
hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the
bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some
pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I
found that I had missed the story conference.
During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase "I'm just
spitballing" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,
"The whole ball of wax," twelve times. However, my story had been
accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the
conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,
the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which
rung of the ladder you have achieved.
The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the
apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing
there talking to the doorman.
He said, "Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it
at your office building." I looked blank and he explained, "We just
heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed
at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it."
Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. "That's right, Danny, I
just missed it," I said, and went on in.
Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the
other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and
except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going
on.
I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the
directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until
she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.
How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and
such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced
that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the
reasons she supposes.
I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: "When
you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,
too."
Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in
front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate
me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.
When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the
manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The
pencil was standing on its end.
* * * * *
There, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear
about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank
some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the
muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter
to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last
sentence.
Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.
My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's
notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed
one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: "Garbage
picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I
love you." What can you do when the girl loves you?
I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window
at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was
exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be
allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.
Pigeons fly as a rule in formation and turn simultaneously, so that
their wings all catch the sunlight at the same time. I was thinking
about this decorative fact when I saw that as they were making a turn,
they seemed to bunch up together. By some curious chance, they all
wanted the same place in the sky to turn in, and several collided and
fell.
The man was as surprised as I and went to one of the dazed birds and
picked it up. He stood there shaking his head from side to side,
stroking its feathers.
My speculations about this peculiar aerial traffic accident were
interrupted by loud voices in the hallway. Since our building is
usually very well behaved, I was astonished to hear what sounded like
an incipient free-for-all, and among the angry voices I recognized that
of my neighbor, Nat, a very quiet guy who works on a newspaper and has
never, to my knowledge, given wild parties, particularly in the late
afternoon.
"You can't say a thing like that to me!" I heard him shout. "I tell you
I got that deck this afternoon and they weren't opened till we started
to play!"
Several other loud voices started at the same time.
"Nobody gets five straight-flushes in a row!"
"Yeah, and only when you were dealer!"
The tone of the argument was beginning to get ugly, and I opened the
door to offer Nat help if he needed it. There were four men confronting
him, evidently torn between the desire to make an angry exit and the
impulse to stay and beat him up. His face was furiously red and he
looked stunned.
"Here!" he said, holding out a deck of cards, "For Pete's sake, look at
'em yourselves if you think they're marked!"
The nearest man struck them up from his hand. "Okay, Houdini! So
they're not marked! All I know is five straight...."
His voice trailed away. He and the others stared at the scattered cards
on the floor. About half were face down, as might be expected, and the
rest face up--all red.
* * * * *
Someone must have rung, because at that moment the elevator arrived and
the four men, with half frightened, incredulous looks, and in silence,
got in and were taken down. My friend stood looking at the neatly
arranged cards.
"Judas!" he said, and started to pick them up. "Will you look at that!
My God, what a session...."
I helped him and said to come in for a drink and tell me all about it,
but I had an idea what I would hear.
After a while, he calmed down, but he still seemed dazed.
"Never seen anything to equal it," he said. "Wouldn't have believed
it. Those guys _didn't_ believe it. Every round normal, nothing
unusual about the hands--three of a kind, a low straight, that sort
of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be _my_
deal. Brother! Straight flush to the king--every time! And each time,
somebody else has four aces...."
He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There
was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it, the top
broke and glass chips got into the bottle.
"I'll have to go down for more soda," I said.
"I'll come, too. I need air."
At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in
what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the
top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the
tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from
at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and
I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth
open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his
mouth open.
On the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie
his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi
swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,
its rear end lightly flipping the front of one of those small foreign
cars, which was going rather fast. It turned sideways and, without any
side-slip, went right up the stoop of a brownstone opposite, coming to
rest with its nose inside the front door, which a man opened at that
moment.
The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and
the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged
crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either
forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi
to a lamp.
Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at
all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.
Everyone was honking his horn.
Danny was furious--more so when he tried to put through a call to his
station house from the box opposite.
It was out of order.
* * * * *
Upstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the
windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had
brightened up considerably.
"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office," he said.
"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper." He grinned
and nodded toward the pandemonium.
When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk
lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except
one. That was tied in three knots.
All _right_, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had
come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call
McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university
uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he
knows everything.
When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,
_more_ trouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's
voice said, "Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were
connected. That's a damn funny coincidence."
"Not in the least," I said. "Come on over here. I've got something for
you to work on."
"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly--"
"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent."
"At once," he said, and hung up.
While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of
my novel--perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a
point where I was about to put down the word "agurgling," I decided it
was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter
"R." Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to
the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.
This was absolutely not my day.
* * * * *
"Well," McGill said, "nothing you've told me is impossible or
supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against
that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.
It's all those other things...."
He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight
while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.
"Alec, you're a reasonable guy, so I don't think you'll take offense at
what I'm going to say. What you have told me is so impossibly unlikely,
and the odds against it so astronomical, that I must take the view that
you're either stringing me or you're subject to a delusion." I started
to get up and expostulate, but he motioned me back. "I know, but don't
you see that that is far more likely than...." He stopped and shook
his head. Then he brightened. "I have an idea. Maybe we can have a
demonstration."
He thought for a tense minute and snapped his fingers. "Have you any
change on you?"
"Why, yes," I said. "Quite a bit." I reached into my pocket. There
must have been nearly two dollars in silver and pennies. "Do you think
they'll each have the same date, perhaps?"
"Did you accumulate all that change today?"
"No. During the week."
He shook his head. "In that case, no. Discounting the fact that you
could have prearranged it, if my dim provisional theory is right, that
would be _actually_ impossible. It would involve time-reversal. I'll
tell you about it later. No, just throw down the change. Let's see if
they all come up heads."
I moved away from the carpet and tossed the handful of coins onto the
floor. They clattered and bounced--and bounced together--and stacked
themselves into a neat pile.
I looked at McGill. His eyes were narrowed. Without a word, he took a
handful of coins from his own pocket and threw them.
These coins didn't stack. They just fell into an exactly straight line,
the adjacent ones touching.
"Well," I said, "what more do you want?"
"Great Scott," he said, and sat down. "I suppose you know that
there are two great apparently opposite principles governing the
Universe--random and design. The sands on the beach are an example
of random distribution and life is an example of design. The motions
of the particles of a gas are what we call random, but there are so
many of them, we treat them statistically and derive the Second Law of
Thermodynamics--quite reliable. It isn't theoretically hard-and-fast;
it's just a matter of extreme probability. Now life, on the other
hand, seems not to depend on probability at all; actually, it goes
against it. Or you might say it is certainly not an accidental
manifestation."
"Do you mean," I asked in some confusion, "that some form of life is
controlling the coins and--the other things?"
* * * * *
He shook his head. "No. All I mean is that improbable things usually
have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken,
I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the
book of rules. Something--I don't know what--is going on, and it seems
to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you
still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?"
"I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left."
"Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?"
"Center of what?" I asked. "I feel as though I were the center of an
electrical storm. Something has it in for me!"
McGill grinned. "Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be
anthropomorphic."
"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life."
"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are
being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a
non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder." He had a faraway,
frowning look.