THE TRAP
By Betsy Curtis
She had her mind made up--the one way they'd make her young again was over her dead body!
Old Miss Barbara Noble twitched aside the edge of the white scrim curtain to get a better look at the young man coming down the street. He might be the one.
The young man bent a little under the weight of the battered black suitcase as he crossed Maple and started up Prospect on Miss Noble's side. She could see him set the case down on the wide porch of the Raney house and wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. Then she lost sight of him as he advanced to the door. He could be a visitor to the Raney's, but they were out of town on vacation. He could be a salesman.
Miss Barbara shifted her rocker to the other side of the window where she could watch without having to disturb the curtain. This second-floor sitting room made an excellent lookout. She quickly scanned the street in the other direction, but there was no sign of movement in the hot sunlight. She settled down to watch the black suitcase sitting uncommunicatively at the edge of the porch.
It must have been all of two minutes before the young man appeared from under the over-hanging roof and picked up the case. A persistent fellow. He went down to the sidewalk and approached her own house, came up on her own front doorstep, tried to set the case down on the narrow stoop, couldn't, straightened up and rang the bell. A raucous buzz filled the sitting room.
* * * * *
Barbara Noble leaned toward the window, pulled back the curtain a scant inch, and studied his back as he looked at the windows on the other side of the front door. Limp yellow hair and a big perspiration stain in the middle of a dark sport shirt were her chief impressions. He could be a bona fide salesman working hard at it. She wouldn't let him in, of course; but she felt a little sorry for him lugging that big case around in this weather. Then he turned and looked straight at the window behind which she was hiding, and she let the curtain go suddenly. Had he seen it move? The buzzer sounded again, imperiously.
Miss Barbara got up stiffly, moved to the big vizer screen in the nearest corner, and switched it on. The man might have something interesting and she couldn't get out to shop the way she used to. She smoothed her lilac housedress and left the room to descend the stairs to the front door.
In the tiny front hall she hesitated, then opened the door inward about eight inches. Deftly the man stuck the broad brown toe of his shoe into the opening and looked down at her. She grinned as she saw his expression of shock.
She was old, really old. Her sparse white hair was pulled so tightly into a knob on top of her head that the plentiful wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes seemed to run vertically, giving her an oriental look. The hand she rested on the door jamb was a waxy-white claw, a blue vein standing up prominently under the skin tight-drawn over gnarly finger joints. He had probably never seen a woman much past middle age.
"Well?" Her croak was high and rough.
* * * * *
The young man recovered himself and began his spiel. "Madame, I represent one of the best-known and most reputable firms in the country. Our products have received three international medals for purity and effective performance. They...."
"What are you selling, young man?"
"I have the privilege of being a field representative for Taffeta Beauty Aids. Please accept this generous ten-ounce bottle of our Diamond Dew Refreshest Lotion...." He reached into his side pocket and brought it out, offered it with the most appreciative smile, his 'you hardly need this' smile.
Her hand did not reach out. "I don't want any. Goodbye!" The door tightened against his foot.
"But madame," his foot did not budge and his smile became both engaging and pleading, "all I ask is a chance to show you our line. Our products sell themselves. Besides, I'm paid on a demonstration basis--so much for every potential customer who receives our free sample and so much for every home demonstration. You wouldn't want me to lose two-fifty when it would take only six and a third minutes of your time exactly to look over one of the most amazing displays ever...."
"Well, I don't know...."
"I know you'll enjoy watching our Tissue Cleanser in action and seeing the new simplicity of our Home Re--...." (oops, he'd almost said it) "... Hair Relustrification Kit. I promise you that your few minutes won't be wasted."
"Yours would be, young man. I don't buy that stuff."
"You may be one of the lucky few women who don't need our products, but I don't think you can say that before you've seen them."
"I never did see such persistence, honest to goodness!" Her face assumed a crabbed smile. "Come along then."
* * * * *
She moved back from the door into the darkness of the house; and the salesman shifted his case back to his left hand, pushed the front door wide and took a quick long step inside. He was just in time to hear the slight click of the closing of a second door in front of him. He reached for the knob, turned it; but the door was locked. The outside door still stood open, caught by the end of the sample case.
The July daylight from outside showed him that he was in a tiny entrance hall not more than forty inches each way. He pulled the case in and by squeezing against the inner door allowed the front door to close. Anyhow, he was inside the house. He rapped sharply on the inner door.
The latch on the front door snapped to and instantly the hall was flooded with light from a tremendous bulb in the ceiling, which, surprisingly, was twenty feet above him.
A harsh voice, tinny with tremendous amplification but unmistakably that of the old woman, filled the hall, "ALL RIGHT, YOUNG MAN. I HAVE THE VIZER TURNED ON YOU. LET'S SEE THE DEMONSTRATION. I BELIEVE YOU SAID SIX MINUTES. GET ON WITH IT."
Screening his eyes with his fingers, the salesman scanned the walls and ceiling for the vizer lens, found it beside the five-hundred watt bulb pouring blindingly down on him, on the other side of a speaker grille.
"C-certainly, madame." What a layout. As he automatically laid his case on the floor and opened back the top against the front door, his eyes searched the walls for indications of openings which might mean unexpected defenses such as anesthetic tanks. The only breaks in the two smooth white plaster surfaces which he could see as he squatted before the case were a horizontal row of glass bosses on each side at about the height of his knees.
"Now, since my face," he closed his eyes and flashed a toothy smile, like a video actor, up at the vizer lens, "is subjected to the daily care of Taffeta Products," he turned his face down to the case and gritted his teeth, "I must smear facial muscle softener into the left half to show the action and appearance of muscles which have lost their tonus." He whipped the cover off a small ivorine jar and rubbed his cheek vigorously with a brownish salve. "You will note that this softener also contains a percentage of grime which lodges in the pores."
He heard a gasp from the speaker grille when he displayed a face whose left cheek and brow were sagged, wrinkled and hideously brown speckled. From somewhere behind the gasp, he heard a continuous tinkle of tiny bells.
His hands moved among the bottles and jars, raised a round silver box which he held up. "The delicately perfumed applicator pads for all applications of Taffeta Preparations are pre-saturated with Firmol Tone Charger. I dip the pad into this solution of Enhancing Hyssop," he did so, "and work it gently into the pores. The results are instantaneous!" He turned up his original video star appearance.
* * * * *
While bending his body forward to reach the articles strapped to the top of the case, he noticed that the tone of the distant bells was raised. Screwing a circular hairbrush to the thread of a collapsible tube, he sank back on his haunches. The bell tones were lower. He placed a hand on one of the glass bosses nearest the inner door, apparently to steady himself. An even lower tone was added to the bell notes. Obviously electric eyes with a set of bell signals in the old woman's present location. He smiled down at the floor--to himself.
[Illustration]
"Now I want you to notice closely this object which I will show you." He held up the brush with the tube screwed on its back and turned it about. "Do you know what this is?"
There was no answer from the speaker but its own hum and the tinkle of the bells. "What does it look like?" He spoke rapidly, pleasantly. There was still no answer.
He rose quickly and tried the knob of the inner door again. He could hear the bell notes lower in pitch as he pressed against the door.
"LET ME SEE THE THING AGAIN, YOUNG MAN. HONEST TO GOODNESS, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHETHER OR NOT I KNOW WHAT IT IS? IT LOOKS LIKE A HAIRBRUSH WITH SOME DO-JIGGER ON THE TOP."
He jumped back to the center of the hall. "This brush is the essential feature of our sensational Hair Relustrifier Kit. The tube screwed to the top feeds the specially developed Brilliancette directly through each hollow bristle to reach every part of the hair." He ran or rather scrubbed the brush through the right side of his long fair pompadour with small rotary motions. When he removed the brush, that side of his head was covered with crisp yellow ringlets which shone under the light like sculptured gold.
"THAT'S SOME SORT OF A TRICK! DO IT ON THE OTHER...." Her voice was interrupted by a syncopated clicking. A telephone signal. "JUST A MOMENT, YOUNG MAN." The hum of the speaker cut off and the sudden silence seemed full of the echoes of the bells.
* * * * *
Instantly the man dropped the gadget into the case and grabbed a handful of cleansing tissues from a box in it. He snapped down the top of the case and whipped the straps through the buckles. Then he shoved the case against one of the side walls and sat on it to flip off his shoes and socks. Shoving his back tightly against the wall, he bent his knees up and pushed his bare feet flat against the other. After placing the wad of tissues in his lap, he put his hands against the wall below his buttocks and, like an experienced mountain climber, inched his way rapidly up the 'chimney' of the hall. When his head touched the ceiling, he braced himself firmly with his left hand and reached with his right for the tissues in his lap. Protecting his hand with several of the white papers, he felt above him for the base of the light bulb, unscrewed it, and dropped it gently onto the rest of the tissues still in his lap. The sudden blackness was smothering.
Heat seeped through the tissues more rapidly than he had expected; and the effort to keep his knees from contracting and spilling him in the utter darkness to the floor fifteen feet below was agony.
When he finally reached the floor, he placed the bulb on it beside the sample case. Then he opened the front door and closed it again, leaving the door caught open a fraction of an inch by the latch against the frame. Taking an anesthetic cartridge out of his pants pocket, he broke the seal, taking care not to trigger it, and returned to his crevice-climbing posture. He lifted himself again above the row of electric eyes and waited, cartridge in hand, leg muscles cramping painfully.
* * * * *
After Miss Noble had turned off the speakphone, she pulled herself away from the fascinating view of golden curls and scuttled over to a stiff ladder-back chair beside the telephone stand. She lifted the antique cradle phone (none of these modern invasions of privacy like the vizerphone) and spoke warily into the mouthpiece.
"Who is it? What do you want?"
"Barbara?" A man's voice was urgent.
"This is Miss Noble speaking," she replied haughtily.
The voice was savage. "Well, this is Doctor Harris, then. Have you looked at the mail today? I got my directors' meeting notice this morning."
"Yes, I got one. The fifth of August," she said impatiently.
"And this seems to be our year. There's been a girl here already this morning with some story about my having advertised for a housekeeper. She told it to the doorphone and wouldn't leave when I said I didn't want anybody--but it only took one drop of skunk oil in the hallway to send her packing." The horrid chuckle that came from the receiver was so raucous that Miss Noble held it away from her ear.
"Blonde or brunette?" she asked noncommittally.
"Blonde--and really young, not a damn rejuvenee!"
"Rod Harris! You actually went and peeked at her, you old goat!"
"Only through the one-way."
"Well, since the company knows that a pretty girl is still good bait for an old ninny, you're as good as a goner. They'll have you rejuvenated before long."
"They won't get a chance to! And I'm going to get old enough so I can't even lift a hand to thumb my nose at the company. Then I'm going to go and die and the Juvine Perpetual Youth Corporation will scream in agony as it disbands and makes public property of its hallowed formulas as per the original articles of incorporation ... and you will probably get a new set of false teeth and take the treatment again since you could get it real cheap when the monopoly's finished and not have to disturb your millions salted away in the sugar bowl."
This mixture of facetiousness and downright sarcasm was only surpassed by Miss Noble, who snapped back, "Don't you sneer at me, Doctor Roland Harris, when you know perfectly well that the only reason I have to go on living this long is to make sure that you are really dead first. You didn't invent rejuvenation all by yourself without the aid of Barbara Noble, Ph.D., and the company has the sole right to the process until we're both dead. And, if you start peeking at plump blonde wenches at this point, I suppose I'll have to live till Los Alamos freezes over!"
"All right, all right. But she wasn't plump. She wasn't any bigger than you are. Besides, you know I'd rather have dinner with you. My man Marko could give us roast beef with all the fixings and afterward I want you to hear my latest discovery. It's the best damn extempore-singer you've ever heard, Jeery Wade--fellow in his first late fifties, no fluff-brain of a juvenee--a blood and thunder baritone that'll lift that knob of hair clean off your scalp. Let's say you get here about six-thirty and I'll phone him we'll be over at his place for a session of hollering about eight."
* * * * *
Miss Noble's scorn needed no vizer to carry it over the wire in full force. "I'm not going to budge out of this house until after the director's meeting and then only if the shops stop all delivery service. This time I'm not taking any chances. Life is too much of a bore to have to put up with it for another eighty years even for your marvelous singer who would probably go and get rejuvenated just as I got to enjoy him. And nothing could induce me to listen to an evening of your stories for the nine hundredth time. If there's one thing I'm thankful for in this scatter-brained age, it's the marriage dissolution law that's got me free from your anecdotes after three separate terms of fifty years each."
"Now, Barbara, was it that bad?" Roland Harris sounded distressed.
"Do you really think I could be honestly grateful to the Corporation for a hundred and fifty years of listening to that disgraceful old thing about the Martian, the Venusian, and the robot?"
"Well, if you feel that way about it, I'll keep my discoveries to myself. I hope your fancy hallway keeps you safe till you rot."
"It's doing all right," replied the old woman smugly. "I have a young pup down there right now cooling his number thirteens and waiting to pretend to interest me in some new face paint and hair gik. My electric eye set and vizer are less repulsive than your skunk oil and twice as effective."
"They're not going to stop me from having a good time while I last, anyhow. I think they're through with me for today; and I'm going to hear Jeery Wade, anyhow. He'll make up a hooting good song about all this when I tell him."
"Take care of yourself, Rod ... goodbye," said Miss Noble, almost concernedly.
She dropped the phone into its cradle, rose, and went back to the vizer screen, switching on the speaker as she sat down. Only then did she notice that the screen was entirely dark except for a vague sliver of gray.
"Are you still there, young man?" she asked the microphone.
There was silence from the speaker. The hammer on each bar of the long metal xylophone of the electric eye signal hung motionless.
"He's gone ... and left the front door unlatched too. And I thought he was persistent." She was disappointed. "He owes me four more minutes of fun."
She got up slowly and started for the door. "That curly hair stuff is new since my last sixties, too. I wonder if it would work on white hair ... I'd better go down and close the door. Can't have just anybody coming into one's house."
* * * * *
She descended the stairs, opened the door from the front room, then took one step forward into the hall. Before she could interpret the soft bump of the salesman's bare feet as they struck the floor, she was encircled by his strong arm; and the hiss of the anesthetic gun was loud in the small area of the hall. Limply she sagged against his arm.
The hissing of the gun stopped. The young man slipped it into his pocket and, turning, thrust the inner door wide open with his now free hand. Entering the tidy front room, he kicked the door shut behind him and gulped in the good air before he headed for the back of the house, cradling the small body easily in his arms. Failing to find there what he was looking for, he went up the narrow white-railed stairway to the second floor. Across the landing, the gleam of porcelain showed through a half-open door.
He laid his burden carefully on the vari-colored braided rug by the tub and began to draw a warm bath, testing the temperature frequently with his hand. When water reached the overflow outlet, he turned off the tap and sprinted downstairs for his sample case. The hall was still chokingly full of gas; and after grabbing out the case, he slammed the door again. He brought the case up to the bathroom, where he opened it on the floor beside the form of the old woman. He lifted out the tray, revealing masses of silvery tubing and a number of flasks of iridescent solutions nestling among loops of rubber insulated wiring. One flask he emptied into the bath, making the water seethe and turn a cloudy green.
Then, dashing down the stairs again, he began looking for the telephone. His search became more and more hurried, as he opened cupboards and drawers in front room and kitchen with no success. Returning upstairs, he almost missed the instrument in the sitting-room because he was expecting the familiar sight of a round vizer screen. He stood over the phone and dialed.
"Hey, Alice!"
"What luck, Riggy?"
"I'm in. The old lady's out cold on the bathroom floor. Primer solution's in the bath at five above tepid. I'm shoving her in now--with all her clothes on, of course--and I've wasted a lot of time already looking for this hypoblastic phone, so beat it on over here with Margy and get to work."
"Are you ordering me around, Rigel O'Maffey?"
"You know I never did this job on a woman. And don't forget, honey, we'll get enough out of this to get a new copter together. C'mon now." He put the phone back in, the cradle before she could answer.
* * * * *
Back in the bathroom, he drew a long thermometer from the case, took a careful reading on the water, ran in a little more hot from the faucet and left it running the slightest dribble.
Carefully lifting the small body of Barbara Noble, Ph.D., he slid it gently into the water feet first over the end, smoothing down with one hand the percale housedress which ballooned as she went into the water. Finally he knelt beside the tub, holding her head out of the water in the crook of his elbow.
A banging on the inner door downstairs some fifteen minutes later reminded him of the force with which he had slammed it in his hurry to reach the uncontaminated air of the front room. He looked longingly across the bathroom at the racks of towels on the other side, but finally, as the banging stopped and a feminine voice began yelling, "Hey, Riggy! Let us in!" he grabbed up the bright rug and wadded it under the scrawny neck.
The girls scolded him all the way up the stairs for not leaving the door unlocked, while he tried to explain, at the same time, that he had to hold up the woman's head.
"Screepers, Riggy, what do you think the perfectly good pair of water-wings in your case is for?"
Humbled, he departed as the girls took over the beginning of the complicated, fortnight-long process of the rejuvenation of Barbara Noble.
* * * * *
The receptionist behind the ebony desk, whose gold plate proclaimed it as the headquarters of the Juvine Perpetual Youth Corporation, crammed shut the drawer before her. A metallic clink from within was the fall of a mirror with which she had been assisting the application of scarlet which now fluoresced gently on her full lips.
Tossing her head (which showed the crop of glistening black curls to the fullest advantage) in a preoccupied manner, she addressed the man who stood before her desk. "How can the Juvine Perpetual Youth Corporation serve you?" Her hastily assumed look of efficient importance was replaced by melting eagerness as she took in the chiselled perfection of features and the broad shoulders of the young man in knife-creased bronze spunlon.
"I'm Harris. For the directors' meeting." His voice was curt.
"You're Doctor Harris? The Director? Oh, do come in." She rose from the desk and went around the end of it to open the high wrought-gold gate and hold it wide for him. "You're a little early. I'll take you down to the Board Room." Eager willingness to help was apparent in her every gesture.
"Thanks, I know the way," he informed her, brushing past.
She followed him, however, across the patio-like reception room, with its exotically gardened borders and splashing fountain, down the long corridor past glowing murals of men and women swimming, dancing and playing tennis, past tapestry shielded doorways to the great bright arch at the end. Before he went through, she caught his sleeve.
"I should be pleased to steno for you today, if you need me."
He turned and looked at her as if he had not known she was behind him. "Thanks, but I sha'n't need one. It'll be a short meeting." He smiled down and patted her cheek. "But if I'm not entirely satisfied with the proceedings, maybe I can dictate a little afterward."
She laughed as if that were a special joke between them and retreated rapidly down the corridor before he had time to turn and miss the splendor of her graceful carriage.
His eyebrows were still raised and the corners of his mouth curved in appreciation when he passed through the arch and into the vast room under the clear bubble of a tremendous skydome.
* * * * *
A girl was sitting there, her back to him, looking out over the simmering city streets to the cool rise of mountains beyond. He recognized at once the slight figure, the sheen of the long curling auburn bob, the poise of her head and slim hand resting on the arm of the chair.
"Babs!"
She turned half around. "Hello, Rod."
He grinned and sank down in the next chair. "Here we are again."
"Knocked out by your own skunk oil?" she asked pointedly.
"No. Company copter man got me leaving Jeery Wade's. What happened to you? I thought you were walled up neatly for the declining years."
"The cosmetic man ambushed me in the hall. But I've got another fifty years to figure out something better ... if I still need it."
"What do you mean if you still need it? Are you changing your mind about rejuvenation?"
She smiled. "Well, you know it's always fun at first. But I'm having my lawyer come to this meeting. I've got an idea we can change the articles of agreement so that the process can finally become public property at the end of another fifty years instead of only after our deaths. Then if we want to go on and die, nobody" (she waved her hand around the great room at the little group of athletic men and glamorous, expensively gowned women moving in through the arch) "nobody will have any financial interest in rejuvenating us. Then, too, our own fat incomes will lapse; and since that's the reason we set up the articles the way they are--so we'd never be in danger of starving, that is--we'd have the more interesting choice of whether to die off or get young again and go back to work. Would you sign a fifty-year termination, Rod?"
"Would you marry me for the fifty years, Babs?" His voice was gentle, pleading.
"Honest to goodness, now, aren't you really pretty tired of me?" she asked earnestly, turning to face him.
"No, I can't say I am. You're pretty special, doctor, and you're special pretty." It was a ritual.
"You know you're the only man. I'll marry you. Will you sign?"
"Of course I'll sign. I would have anyhow when I knew you wanted me to. And Babs--maybe we could get some sort of jobs now--sort of to get in practice. I'll bet we could rent a lab somewhere and do commercial analyses for a while until we got hit by another idea for research."
"Rod, that's the best idea you've had in the last hundred and fifty years. But we could have a honeymoon first, couldn't we?"
"That's your best suggestion in the last seventy years. And maybe we could get Jeery Wade and his wife to rejuvenate and go with us. After the first couple of weeks, that is."
* * * * *
They left the meeting arm in arm, somewhat ahead of the rather disgruntled group of directors, who stayed behind to lament the end of a good thing. In the garden room, Barbara stopped to choose an orchid.
Rod Harris wandered on to the receptionist's desk, where the girl of the black curls waited, smiling.
He looked back at Barbara, then smiled down at the girl. "Just like I said ... a short meeting. No need for any dictating. Lucky you."
"Oh, I don't know," she countered coyly.
"Say, I heard a story the other day you might like. Do you like stories?"
"What kind of story?"
"You'd have to be the judge of that."
Suddenly Barbara was with them, pinning on a bronze and green blossom. "C'mon along, dear. We've got a good many things to do before we leave."
He opened the golden wicket for her and followed her out. Turning back toward the desk, he called to the girl, "I may be back in a few weeks to see about a job. Remind me then to tell you the one about the Martian, the Venusian and the robot."
CLEAN BREAK
By Roger Dee
A veteran veterinarian might have vamoosed--but Watts had to help any sick animal....
Nothing more exciting ever happened to Oliver Watts than being rejected by his draft board for a punctured eardrum until, deferring as usual to the superior judgment of his Aunt Katisha and of Glenna--his elder and militantly spinster sister--he put away his lifelong dream and took up, at the age of twenty-five, the practice of veterinary medicine.
The relinquished dream was Oliver's ambition, cherished since childhood, to become some day a hunter and trainer of jungle animals. It had been discouraged firmly and at length by his Aunt Katisha, who maintained that the skin of the last male Watts was not to be risked in a pursuit so perilous; and his Aunt Katisha won. He would do far better, Oliver realized finally, to resign himself to the quiet suburban life of Landsdale, Florida, and to perpetuate the Watts line by marrying some worthy and practical local girl. The quiet life, it developed, was that of a D. V. M.; the worthy and practical girl, Miss Orella Simms of Tampa, to whom he was now engaged.
To put it plainly, Oliver was until the moment of his Great Opportunity a good-humored stooge with a cowlick and a sense of responsibility, whose invariable cue was family obligation and whose crowning virtue was docility. He was maneuvered into becoming a D. V. M. (though to tell the truth the profession suited him well enough, being the nearest possible approach to realizing his ambition) solely because the veterinary college in Tampa was near enough to Landsdale for commuting and because his later practice could be carried on under the guiding aegis of his personal matriarchy. The virtuous, and vapid, Orella Simms became his fiancee by the same tactics and for the same reasons.
Oliver had considered rebellion, of course, but common sense discouraged the idea. He had no intimates outside his family nor any experience with the world beyond Landsdale and Tampa, and his fledgling self-confidence invariably bogged down in a welter of introspective apprehensions when he thought of running away. Where would he go, and to whom could he turn in emergency?
Such was the character and condition of Oliver Watts when his newly undertaken practice of veterinary medicine threw him into the company of "Mr. Thomas Furnay" and of a girl whose name, as nearly as it can be rendered into English, was Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above. Their advent brought Oliver face to face for the first time in his sedentary life with High Adventure--with adventure so high, as a matter of fact, that it took him literally and bodily out of this humdrum world.
* * * * *
The initial step was taken when Mr. Furnay, known to Landsdale as a wealthy and eccentric old recluse who had recently leased a walled property on Federal Route 27 that had once been the winter retreat of a Prohibition-era gangster, was driven by emergency to call upon Oliver for professional service. Mr. Furnay usually kept very much to himself behind his iron-grilled gates and his miles of stuccoed wall; but it happened that in pursuit of his business (whose true nature would have confounded Landsdale to its insular core) he had just bought up the entire menagerie of an expiring circus billed as Skadarian Brothers, and it was the sudden illness of one of his newly acquired animals that forced him to breach his isolation.
Mr. Furnay called at the Watts place in his town car, driven by a small, dark and taciturn chauffeur named Bivins. He found Oliver at work in his neatly ordered clinic at the rear of the big house, busily spooning cod-liver oil into a trussed and thoroughly outraged chow named Champ.
"I have a sick animal," Mr. Furnay stated tersely. He was a slight man with a moderately long and wrinkled face, a Panama hat two sizes too large and a voice that had, in spite of its excellent diction, a jarring timbre and definitely foreign flavor.
Oliver blinked, surprised and a little dismayed that Fate should have sent him so early in his career a known and patently captious millionaire. Bivins, waiting in visored and putteed impassivity to reopen the door for his master, was silently impressive; the town car, parked on the crushed shell driveway outside, glittered splendidly in the late afternoon sunshine.
"I'll be happy to call later in the day," Oliver said. He removed the padded block that had held Champ's jaws apart, and narrowly missed losing a finger as the infuriated chow snapped at his hand. "My aunt and sister are bringing my fiancee down from Tampa for dinner this evening, and I can't leave the clinic until they get here. Someone might call for his pet."
Mr. Furnay protested his extremity of need. "The animal suffers periodic convulsions," he said. "It may be dangerously ill!"
Oliver unstrapped Champ from his detention frame and dodged with practiced skill when the chow tried to bite him on the thigh. He had taken it for granted--having heard none of the gossip concerning Mr. Furnay's recent purchase of the Skadarian Brothers' menagerie--that the sick animal in question was a dog or cat or perhaps a saddle horse, and the bald description of its symptoms startled him more than Champ's predictable bid for revenge.
"Convulsions? What sort of animal is it, Mr. Furnay?"
"A polar bear," said Mr. Furnay.
"Polar bear!" echoed Oliver, and in his shock of surprise he dropped a detaining strap and let Champ loose.
* * * * *
The dog sprang across the room--without a breath of warning, as chows will--and bit Bivins on the leg just above his puttee. The chauffeur screamed in a high and peculiarly raucous voice and jerked away, jabbering in a vowelless and totally unfamiliar foreign tongue. Mr. Furnay said something sharply in the same grating language; Bivins whipped out a handkerchief, pressed it over the tear in his whipcords and went quickly out to the car.
Oliver collared the snarling Champ and returned him to his cage, where the dog pressed bristling against the bars and stared at Mr. Furnay hungrily with wicked, muddy eyes.
Mr. Furnay's shocked voice said, behind Oliver, "What a ghastly world, where even the pets...."
He broke off sharply as Oliver turned from the cage.
"I'm truly sorry, Mr. Furnay," Oliver apologized. "If there's anything I can do ... a dressing for Bivins' leg--"
Mr. Furnay gathered himself with an effort. "It is nothing, a scratch that will heal quickly. But my bear--you will come to see him at once?"
At another time, the thought of absenting himself without due notice to his Aunt Katisha and Glenna would have prompted Oliver to refuse; but the present moment called more for diplomacy than for convention. Better to suffer matriarchal displeasure, he thought, than to risk a damage suit by a millionaire.
"I'll come at once," Oliver said. "I owe you that, I think, after the fright Champ gave you."
And, belatedly, the realization that he might handle a bear--a great, live, lumbering bear!--surged up inside him to titillate his old boyhood yearning. Perhaps it was as well that his aunt and sister were away; this chance to exercise his natural skill at dealing with animals was too precious to decline.
"Of course I won't guarantee a cure," Oliver said, qualifying his promise, "because I've never diagnosed such a case. But I think I can help your bear."
Oddly enough, he was almost sure that he could. Oliver, in his younger days, had read a great deal on the care and treatment of circus animals, and the symptoms in this instance had a familiar sound. Mr. Furnay's bear, he thought, in all probability had worms.
The Furnay town car purred away, leaving Oliver to marvel at his own daring while he collected the instruments and medicines he might need.
[Illustration]
In leaving the clinic he noted that Mr. Furnay's chauffeur had dropped his handkerchief at the doorway in his hurry to be gone--but Oliver by this time was in too great a hurry to stop and retrieve it.
His Aunt Katisha might spoil the whole adventure on the instant with a telephone call from Tampa. Bivins could wait.
* * * * *
The drive, after a day spent in the antiseptic confines of his clinic, was like a holiday jaunt.
The late June sun was hot and bright, the rows of suburban houses trim and clean as scrubbed children sunning themselves among color-splashed crotons and hibiscus and flaming poincianas. Oliver whistled gaily as he turned his little white-paneled call truck off the highway and drove between twin ranks of shedding cabbage palms toward the iron gates of the Furnay estate.
A uniformed gateman who might have been a twin to Bivins admitted him, pointing out a rambling white building that lay behind the stuccoed mansion, and shut the gate. Oliver parked his truck before the menagerie building--it had been a stable in the heyday of the Prohibition-era gangster, when it had held horses or cases of contraband as occasion demanded--and found Bivins waiting for him.
Bivins, looking upset and sullen in immaculate new whipcords, opened the sliding doors without a word.
The vast inside of the remodeled stable was adequately lighted by roof-windows and fluorescent bulbs, but seemed dark for the moment after the glare of sun outside; there was a smell, familiar to every circus-goer, of damp straw and animal dung, and a restless background stir of purring and growling and pacing.
Oliver gaped when his eyes dilated enough to show him the real extent of Mr. Furnay's menagerie holdings. At the north end of the building two towering Indian elephants swayed on picket, munching hay and shuffling monotonously on padded, ponderous feet. A roped-off enclosure held half a dozen giraffes which nibbled in aristocratic deprecation at feed-bins bracketed high on the walls; and beyond them three disdainful camels lay on untidily folded legs, sneering glassily at the world and at each other.
The east and west sides of the building were lined with rank after rank of cages holding a staggering miscellany of predators: great-maned lions with their sleek green-eyed mistresses; restless tigers undulating their stripes back and forth and grinning in sly, tusky boredom; chattering monkeys and chimpanzees; leopards and cheetahs and a pair of surly black jaguars whose claw-scored hides indicated either a recent difference of opinion or a burst of conjugal affection.
The south end of the vast room had been recently partitioned off, with a single heavy door breaking the new wall at its center. On either side of this door the bears held sway: shaggy grizzlies, black bears, cinnamon and brown; spectacled Andeans and sleek white polars padding silently on tufted feet.
The sick bear sulked in a cage to himself, humped in an oddly doglike pose with his great head hanging disconsolately.
Oliver sized up the situation, casting back to past reading for the proper procedure.
"I'll need a squeeze-cage and a couple of cage boys to help immobilize the brute," he said. "Will you--"
He was startled, in turning, to find that Bivins had not accompanied him into the building. He was not alone, however. The door at the center of the partitioning wall had opened while he spoke, and a slender blonde girl in the briefest of white sunsuits was looking at him.
* * * * *
Apparently she had not expected Oliver, for there was open interest in her clear green eyes. She said something in a clear and musical--but completely unintelligible--voice that ranged, with a remarkably operatic effect, through two full octaves.
Oliver stared. "I'm here to doctor the sick bear," he said.
"Oh, a native," the girl said in English.
Obviously she was trying to keep her voice within the tonal range of his own, but in spite of the effort it trilled distractingly up and down the scale in a fashion that left Oliver smitten with a sudden and unfamiliar weakness of the knees.
"May I help?" she said.
She might, Oliver replied. She could have had as readily, he might have added, a pint of his blood.
Many times while they worked, finding a suitable squeeze-cage and dragging it against the bear's larger cage so that the two doors coincided, Oliver found the prim and reproachful image of Miss Orella Simms rising to remind him of his obligations; but for the first time in his life an obligation was surprisingly easy to dismiss. His assistant's lively conversation, which was largely uninformative though fascinatingly musical, bemused him even to the point of shrugging off his Aunt Katisha's certain disapproval.
The young lady, it seemed, came from a foreign country whose name was utterly unpronounceable; Oliver gathered that she had not been long with Mr. Furnay, who was of another nationality, and that she was homesick for her native land--for its "saffron sun on turquoise hills and umber sea," which could only be poetic exaggeration or simple unfamiliarity with color terms of a newly learned language--and that she was as a consequence very lonely.
She was, incredibly, a trainer of animals.
"Not of such snarling fierce ones as yours," she said, with a little shiver for the polar bear watching them sullenly through the bars, "but of my own gentle beasts, who are friends."
Her name was a startling combination of soprano sounds that might have been written as Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above, but which Oliver was completely unable to manage.
"Would you mind," he asked, greatly daring, "if I called you Pearl instead?"
She would not. But apparently Mr. Furnay would.
* * * * *
The millionaire, who had entered the menagerie unheard, spoke sternly to the girl in his own raucous tongue and pointed a peremptory finger toward the door through which she had come. The girl murmured "Ai docssain, Tsammai," in a disappointed tone, gave Oliver a smile that would have stunned a harem guard, and disappeared again into her own territory.
Oliver, being neither Chesterfield nor eunuch, was left with the giddy sensation of a man struggling to regain his balance after a sudden earth temblor.
His client reoriented him brusquely, "Treat my bear," Mr. Furnay said.
"I've been waiting for help," Oliver said defensively. "If you'll send around your menagerie manager and a cage boy or two--"
"I have none," Mr. Furnay said shortly. "There are only the four of us here, and not one will approach within touching distance of a brute so vicious."
Oliver stared at him in astonishment.... Four of them meant only Bivins, the gateman, the lovely blonde creature who called herself Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above and Mr. Furnay himself.
"But four inexperienced people can't possibly look after a menagerie of this size!" Oliver protested. "Circus animals aren't house pets, Mr. Furnay--they're restless and temperamental, and they need expert care. They bite and claw each other--"
"There will be more of us later," Mr. Furnay said morosely, "but I doubt that numbers will help. We had not anticipated a ferocity so appalling, and I fear that my error may have proved the ruin of an expensive project. The native beasts were never so fierce on other--"
He broke off. "I am sorry. You will have to manage as best you can alone."
And he left the menagerie without looking back.
To deal tersely with subsequent detail, Oliver did manage alone--after a fashion and up to a point. It was a simple matter, once he found a four-foot length of conveniently loose board, to prod the unhappy bear from his larger prison to the smaller. The process of immobilizing the brute by winching the squeeze-cage tight was elementary.
But in his casting-back Oliver had overlooked two vitally important precautions: he'd forgotten to secure the gear fastenings, and he'd neglected to rope the smaller cage to the larger.
The bear, startled by the prick of the needle when Oliver gave him a sizable injection of nembutal, reacted with a frantic struggling that reversed the action of the unsecured winch and forced the two cages apart. The door burst open, sprung by the sudden pressure.
The bear stood free.
A considerable amount of legitimate excitement could be injected into such a moment by reporting that the bear, at last in a position to revenge itself for past indignities, leaped upon its tormentor with a blood-freezing roar and that Oliver, a fragile pygmy before that near-ton of slavering fury, escaped only by a hair or was annihilated on the spot.
Neither circumstance developed, however, for the reason that the bear was already feeling the effects of the anesthetic given it and wanted nothing so much as a cool dark place where it might collapse in privacy. And Oliver, caught completely off guard, was too stunned by the suddenness of catastrophe to realize his own possible danger.
What did happen was that Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above chose that particular moment to open her door again and look out.
Her fortuitous timing altered the situation on the instant; the bear, bent only on escape and seeing comparative gloom beyond the door, charged not at Oliver but through the opening. And Oliver, still too confused to think past the necessity of retrieving his error, ran after it, brandishing his length of board and shouting wildly.
* * * * *
The smaller area beyond the partition was dimly lighted, but to judge by its straw-covered floor and faint animal smell was evidently a special division of Mr. Furnay's menagerie. The light was too dim and the emergency too great to permit Oliver more than a brief and incredulous glimpse of the improbable beast placidly munching hay in a corner; his whole attention was centered first on the fleeing bear and then upon the prostrate form of Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above, who had been violently bowled over by the bear's rush.
"Pearl!" yelled Oliver, petrified with horror.
The bear stood swaying upright over her, threshing its tufted forepaws for balance and showing yellow tusks in a grimace that stemmed from drugged weakness but which passed quite creditably for a snarl of demoniac fury.
Obviously something had to be done. Oliver, galvanized by the realization, came to the rescue with a promptness that amounted to reflex action.
"Down, boy!" he said, and dealt the bear a sharp blow across the muzzle with his board.
The bear dealt Oliver a roundhouse clout in return that stretched him half-conscious beside Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above. Then, at precisely that moment of greatest dramatic impact, it shook its head dizzily and passed out cold.
The girl scrambled up and knelt beside Oliver to listen to his heartbeat, found that he was alive and raised her voice in an urgent arpeggio that held in spite of its operatic timbre a distinct note of command.
In answer to her call the great beast in the corner--built something on the order of a hippopotamus but with unorthodox variations in that it boasted six legs to either side and was covered with close-curling, bright blue wool--trotted out of the shadows and scooped up the unconscious bear in its four powerful anterior arms.
A word from Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above sent it into the main menagerie quarters, where it stuffed the limp bear into its old cage and trotted back to its mistress with a look of adoring deference on its round face.
The girl gave the creature a random trill of commendation and, displaying surprising strength for one so slight, herself dragged the reviving Oliver back to the scene of his unfinished diagnosis. The order given her earlier by Mr. Furnay was not forgotten, however, for she did not linger.
"Not handsome, no," she murmured, locking the partition door behind her this time. "But O Personal Deity of Unmarried Maidens, such headlong bravery!"
* * * * *
Oliver roused ten minutes later to find himself alone with a memory of nightmare and a sleeping bear that offered no resistance whatever when he funneled a quantity of tetrachlorethylene down its throat.
He was still alone an hour later--and still trying dizzily to separate fact from fancy, having tried the partition door and found it locked--when the bear returned to semi-consciousness and submitted groggily to a follow-up dosage of purgative.
Oliver would have liked to stay long enough to learn the results of his diagnosis and to see Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above if she should reappear, but a glance at his watch electrified him with the realization that he had been away from his clinic for more than two hours and that his Aunt Katisha and Glenna might by now have the state police beating the palmetto flats for his body. Accordingly he left the Furnay estate in a great hurry, pausing at the gate only long enough to leave word for Mr. Furnay that he would ring later in the evening to check his patient's progress.
It was not until he had returned home and found his Aunt Katisha still out that his overworked nerves, punished outrageously by shock, violence and confusion, composed themselves enough to permit him a reasonable guess as to what actually had happened--and by that time his conclusions had taken a turn so fantastically improbable that he was lost again in a hopeless muddle of surmise.
He poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen (he preferred coffee, but his Aunt Katisha frowned on the habit) and took his grisly suspicions down to the clinic, where he felt more at ease than in the antimacassared austerity of the house. There he mulled them over again, and time was able to weave into the pattern the disjointed impressions carried over from his period of semi-consciousness and dismissed until now as nightmare figments from the delirium of shock. Their alignment with other evidence increased his conviction:
Mr. Furnay and Ménage, Oliver concluded with a cold thrill of horror, were not human beings at all but monsters.
* * * * *
The pattern became even more disturbing when he considered various stories of local saucer-sightings and fireballs, which linked themselves with chilling germanity to the events of the day.
First there had been Champ's instant distrust of Mr. Furnay and Bivins, and his attempt to rout them for the aliens they were. There had been Bivins' anomalous scream when bitten--a raucous sound certainly not human--and Mr. Furnay's grittily inconsonant order, spoken in no identifiable earthly tongue. The isolation of the Furnay estate took on a sinister and significant logic, as did its understaffed condition; there was the evident but baffling reluctance of Mr. Furnay and his myrmidons (with the notable exception of the golden-voiced Pearl) to approach even safely caged beasts, and the greater mystery of why a man so terrified of wild animals should have bought a menagerie in the first place.
Considering the part played by Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above in a scheme of things so fantastic left Oliver more disturbed than ever, but for a different reason. That she was unarguably as alien as the others made her equally mysterious, but connoted no share in whatever devious plot occupied the Furnay faction; a reexamination of Mr. Furnay's harshly dictatorial attitude toward her, coupled with Oliver's own uncertain memory of the moment when the girl had come to his rescue, convinced him that she was not ipso facto a member of the extraterrestrial cabal but was its prisoner instead.
Visualizing the probable fate of a beautiful girl held captive by aliens--and forced by them to train outlandish, half-remembered brutes like the one behind the partition--rather strained Oliver's talent for surmise, but at the same time moved him to the uneasy conviction that it was his duty to rescue her in turn.
The thought that he might already be too late appalled him. The slender blonde beauty of Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above was distractingly fresh in his mind, the eager arpeggiation of her voice an indelible memory. Recalling the smile she had given him in parting stirred an internal warmth unguessed at before, an emotional ignition certainly never kindled by his fiancee or family.
* * * * *
Orella Simms, Glenna, his Aunt Katisha!
Thought of his obligations brought him back to reality with a jar; the appalling gulf between fact and fancy made clear to him with sudden and shocking clarity the nonentity's role that had been played, and must be played, all his life by Oliver Watts.
He was the perennial romantic introvert, dreaming impossible dreams compounded of escape reading and frustration, grasping timorously at any thread of adventure that might lead him to forget for the moment the drab monotone of his existence. His mouth twisted wryly. There was, of course, no fantastic alien plot incubating on the Furnay estate, no sunsuited damsel in distress awaiting rescue at his inept hands. He'd imagined the romantic aspects of the episode--the "unearthly" tongue, the improbable beast. No one required, or ever would require, anything of Oliver Watts except his Aunt Katisha and Glenna, who demanded obedience, and Orella Simms, who expected conformity.
As if on cue, the Watts family car swung off the highway and rolled down the crushed shell driveway past the clinic. Oliver's Aunt Katisha got out, leaving Glenna and Orella Simms to wait, and strode into the clinic office.
"I see you've managed to spoil another one," she said acidly, pausing long enough to retrieve the handkerchief Mr. Furnay's chauffeur had lost earlier. "Moreover, I called twice this afternoon and found you gone. Where?"
Oliver, as usual, weathered the storm in silence. Somewhere near the end he managed to squeeze in the information that he had treated a sick animal at the Furnay place--a saddle horse, he said, lying automatically as the lesser of two evils.
His aunt Katisha, her inquisitorial duty discharged, dropped the discolored handkerchief pointedly on Oliver's desk and rejoined Glenna and Orella Simms. The car drove away. Oliver, left alone in the growing dusk of evening to his miserable introspection, found his wandering attention returning unaccountably to the crumpled handkerchief, and drew it closer for a better look.
It was only a harmless square of linen, smudged with dust and spotted with blood from Bivins' chow-bitten leg--but with his closer look Oliver's world sprang up and exploded with a shattering bang in his startled face.
The dust was quite ordinary, but Bivins' blood was not.
It was green.
He was never quite sure, later, just what happened next. He retained a vague memory of roaring away in his Aunt Katisha's car through a reckless showering of crushed shell; sometimes he could recall the cool onrush of wind whipping his face and the frantic dodging of approaching headlamps on the highway. But in the main, his descent upon the Furnay estate was a blank.
Only one fact stood out with freezing clarity, excluding any thought of his Aunt Katisha's certain wrath or of Orella's maidenly reproaches: Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above was in Deadly Danger, and there was none but Oliver Watts to rescue her.
There was a brief instant of lucidity as he approached the Furnay gates through the cabbage palms and was forced to choose a course of action.
The attendant certainly would not admit him without orders from Mr. Furnay, who as certainly would not give them; the walls were much too high and sheer for climbing; and to make the need for haste even more critical, it was only too obvious that the Furnay gang was about to depart.
A tremendous saucer-shaped ship had landed by the menagerie building, where it sat with circular peripheral ports aglow and lines of bold enigmatic hieroglyphs fluorescing greenly on its smooth undersurface. Jointed metal figures scurried here and there, chivvying the last of Mr. Furnay's herbivores up a ramp into the belly of the ship; the predators, in cages drawn by other sleek robot stevedores, followed in orderly procession.
Oliver solved his problem of entry by driving headlong through the iron grillwork.
There was a raucous yelling from the gateman, a monstrous rending of metal and jangling of broken glass. Aunt Katisha's car slewed erratically down the Furnay drive, turned over twice and pitched Oliver out, stunned for the second time that day, into the greenish glow shed by the saucer-ship's lights.
* * * * *
He struggled back to awareness to find his head pillowed on something soft and wonderfully comfortable. A circle of startled faces, most of them dark facsimiles of the putteed Bivins', stared uncertainly down at him. In the near foreground stood Mr. Furnay, wringing his hands and muttering grittily to himself in his own dissonant tongue. Mr. Furnay, seen now for the first time without his too-large Panama, exhibited instead of hair a crest of downy blue feathers and pronged antennae that vibrated softly in the evening breeze.
"Where is she?" Oliver demanded. He scrambled dizzily to his feet, and the circle of faces melted backward hastily. "What have you done with Pearl, you monsters?"
Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above, on whose lap Oliver's head had been pillowed, stood up to move between Oliver and the patently apprehensive Mr. Furnay. She wore a light maroon cape over her sunsuit against the mild chill of evening, and could not possibly have looked less like a damsel in distress. She seemed, as a matter of fact, quite happy.
"I hoped you would come to see me again before blastoff," she said. Her voice skipped, tinkling with pleasure, from octave to octave. "But so suddenly--so dashing, so impetuous!"
"You're going away willingly?" Oliver said dumbly. "Then they're not forcing--you're not a prisoner after all?"
Her laugh was an arpeggiando blending of surprise and amusement. "A prisoner of these Tsammai? No. I am a performer in their company, hired by Xtll--Mr. Furnay--to train and exhibit animals native to my own world."
"But I heard Furnay threaten you in the menagerie building this afternoon! His tone--"
"The Tsammai tongue sounds dreadful because it is all consonants and not based on pitch and nuance as mine is," she said. "But the Tsammai themselves are only tradesmen, and are very gentle. Xtll--Mr. Furnay--only feared that I might say too much to you then, when it was important that the natives should not suspect our identity."
"It is true," Mr. Furnay nodded, sounding relieved. "We must avoid notice on such worlds as yours, which are too backward to appreciate the marvels of our show. We stop here only to scout for new and novel exhibits."
"Show!" Oliver echoed, "You mean all this is--is--"
"What else?" asked Mr. Furnay. He pointed with his antennae to the fluorescent hieroglyphs on the undersurface of the saucer-ship. "See, in our lingua galactica it reads: SKRRFF BROTHERS' INTERSTELLAR CIRCUS, THE GALAXY'S GREATEST. It is the best on the circuit."
He indicated the circle of identical Bivinses. "These are the Skrrff brothers, our owners. I, sir, am business manager."
"But not always a good one," one of the brothers said pointedly. "This time he has bought an entire menagerie of such fierceness that our trainers cannot exhibit it. It will have to be sold to some frontier-planet zoo, and our loss will be staggering."
It was left for Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above to deal with the problem, which she did with universal feminine practicality.
"Oliver made your bear well," she pointed out. "And he is afraid of nothing--nothing! Could he not train his own fierce beasts as well as I train my gentle ones?"
Oliver said, "Huh?"
The Skrrff brothers, of course, implored Oliver on the spot to join them at any salary.
Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above said demurely, in three octaves and for all the world to hear: "And I'm lonely, Oliver!"
Oliver never had a chance.
* * * * *
Life in Landsdale goes quietly on, the ripples made by Oliver's departure long since smoothed away by the years.
Miss Orella Simms has married the Methodist minister who was to have married her to Oliver. Aunt Katisha and Glenna have resigned themselves to Oliver's escape and have taken over the job of assisting Orella to superintend her husband's career, an occupation eminently satisfactory to all because the placid cleric never dreams troublesome dreams of adventure, as Oliver did, to try their matriarchal patience.
... But life is never dull for Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Watts, whose breathtaking performances currently electrify the thrill-hungry cultures of a thousand worlds. They have traveled from Sirius to Sagittarius, and at this writing have two children: a golden-haired daughter of four named Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-sharp-above, and a tow-headed boy of two who has a cowlick like his father's and whose name is Butch.
They are very happy and there has been no talk between them, though they are wealthy enough in galactic credits by now to have bought half a planet for a home, of settling down to the quiet life. They are quite satisfied to leave such consequential decisions to those who like change for the sake of change or who, unlike Oliver, never know when they are well off.
One clean break to a lifetime, Oliver maintains, is enough.