After too many years, T. L. Sherred returns with a story
that gets our SPACE SPECIAL rating. It's the story of a man
with a headache--who found a cure for it! And the cure gave
him more power than any man could dream of.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
So I had a headache. The grandfather of all headaches. You try working
on the roof line sometime, with the presses grinding and the overhead
cranes wailing and the mechanical arms clacking and grabbing at your
inner skull while you snap a shiny sheet of steel like an armored
pillowcase and shove it into the maw of a hungry greasy ogre. Noise.
Hammering, pounding, shrieking, gobbling, yammering, incessant noise.
And I had a headache.
This headache had all the signs of permanency. It stayed with me when
I slid my timecard into an empty slot that clanged back at me, when I
skittered across a jammed street of blowing horns and impatient buses
with brakedrums worn to the rivets, when I got off at my corner and
stood in the precarious safety of a painted island in a whirring storm
of hurtling hornets. It got even worse when I ate dinner and tried to
read my paper through the shrill juvenile squeals of the housing
project where I live surrounded by muddy moppets and, apparently,
faithless wives and quarrelsome spouses. The walls of my Quonset are
no thicker than usual.
When Helen--that's my wife--dropped the casserole we got for a wedding
present from her aunt and just stood there by the kitchen sink crying
her eyes out in frustration I knew she finally had more of a mess to
clean up than just the shattered remains of a brittle bowl. I didn't
say a word. I couldn't. I shoved the chair across the room and watched
it tilt the lamp her mother bought us. Before the lamp hit the floor
my hat was on my head and I was out the door. Behind me I heard at
least one pane of the storm door die in a fatal crash. I didn't look
around to see if it were the one I'd put in last Sunday.
* * * * *
Art was glad to see me. He had the beer drawn and was evening the foam
before the heavy front door had shut us off from the street. "Been a
while, Pete. What's new?"
I was glad to see him, too. It was quiet in there. That's why I go
eight blocks out of my way for my beer. No noise, no loud talking or
you end up on the curb; quiet. Quiet and dark and comfortable and you
mind your own business, usually. "Got any more of those little boxes
of aspirin?"
He had some aspirin and was sympathetic. "Headache again? Maybe you
need a new pair of glasses."
I washed down the pills and asked for a refill on the beer. "Maybe,
Art. What do you know that's new?"
Nothing. We both knew that. We talked for a while; nothing important,
nothing more than the half-spoken, half-grunted short disjointed
phrases we always repeated. Art would drift away and lean on the other
end of the bar and then drift back to me and at the end of each trip
there would be clean ashtrays and the dark plastic along the bar would
gleam and there would be no dregs of dead drinks and the rows of fresh
glasses would align themselves in empty rows on the stainless steel of
the lower counter. Art's a good bartender when he wants to be. I held
up my empty glass.
"One more, Art. Got the radio section of the paper?"