A Saucer of Loneliness (21 page)

“Goodness!” said Miss Phoebe. “You’re getting positively absent-minded. I like to be answered when I speak to you.”

“Whuh? Hm?” He shook himself again and rose. “Sorry, Miss Phoebe. Guess I sorta … did you ask me something?”

“The tea, the tea,” she said with pleasant impatience. “I’ve just poured.”

“Oh,” he said. “Good.”

“Don,” she said, “we’re going to accomplish so
very
much.”

“We sure are. And we’ll do it a hell of a lot faster with your help.”

“I beg—
what
?”

“Joyce and me,” he said patiently. “The things you can do, that planting a reflection in a mirror the way you want it, and knowing who’s at the door and on the phone and all … we can sure use those things.”

“I—I’m afraid I don’t …”

“Oh God, Miss Phoebe, don’t! I hate to see you cut yourself up like this!”

“You were faking.”

“You mean just now, the hypnosis routine? No I wasn’t. You had me under all right. It’s just that it won’t stick with me. Everything worked but the commands.”

“That’s—impossible!”

“No it ain’t. Not if I had a deeper command to remember ’em—and disregard ’em.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” she said tautly.
“She
did it!”

He nodded.

“She’s evil, Don, can’t you see? I was only trying to save—”

“I know what you were tryin’ to save,” he interrupted, not unkindly. “You’re in real good shape for a woman your age, Miss Phoebe. This power of yours, it keeps you going. Keeps your glands going. With you, that’s a problem. With us, now, it’ll be a blessing. Pity you never thought of that.”

“Foul,” she said, “how perfectly foul …”

“No it ain’t!” he rapped. “Look, maybe we’ll all get a chance to work together after all, and if we do, you’ll get an idea what kind of chick Joyce is. I hope that happens. But mind you, if it don’t, we’ll get along. We’ll do all you can do, in time.”

“I’d
never
cooperate with evil!”

“You went and got yourself a little mixed up about that, Miss Phoebe. You told me yourself about yin an’ Yang, how some folks set a course straight an’ true an’ never realize the boundary can twist around underneath them. You asked me just tonight was I sure which was which, an’ I said yes. It’s real simple. When you see somebody with power who is usin’ it for what Yang stands for—good, an’ light, an’ all like that, you’ll find he ain’t usin’ it for himself.”

“I wasn’t using it for myself!”

“No, huh?” He chuckled. “Who was it I was goin’ to kiss an’ hold just like it was Joyce?”

She moaned and covered her face. “I just wanted to keep you pure,” she said indistinctly.

“Now that’s a thing you got to get straightened out on. That’s a big thing. Look here.” He rose and went to the long bookcase. Through her fingers, she watched him. “Suppose this here’s all the time that has passed since there was anything like a human being on earth.” He moved his hand from one end of the top shelf to the other. “Maybe way back at the beginning they was no more ’n smart monkeys, but all the same they had whatever it is makes us human beings. These forces you talk about, they were operatin’ then just like now. An’ the cave men an’ the savages an’ all, hundreds an’ hundreds of years, they kept developing until we got humans like us.

“All right. You talk about ancient mysteries, your Yoga an’ all. An’ this tie-up with virgins. Look, I’m going to show you somepin. You an’ all your studyin’ and copyin’ the ancient secrets, you know how ancient they were? I’ll show you.” He put out his big hand and put three fingers side by side on the “modern” end of the shelf. “Those three fingers covers it—down to about fourteen thousand years before Christ. Well, maybe the thing did work better without sex. But only by throwin’ sex into study instead of where it was meant to go. Now you want to free yourself from sex in your thinkin’,
there’s a much better way than that. You do it like Joyce an’ me. We’re a bigger unit together than you ever could be by yourself. An’ we’re not likely to get pushed around by our glands, like you. No offense, Miss Phoebe … so there’s your
really
ancient mystery. Male an’ female together; there’s a power for you. Why you s’pose people in love get to fly so high, get to feel like gods?” He swept his hand the full length of the shelf. “A
real
ancient one.”

“Wh—where did you learn all this?” she whispered.

“Joyce. Joyce and me, we figured it out. Look, she’s not just any chick. She quit school because she learns too fast. She gets everything right now, this minute, as soon as she sees it. All her life everyone around her seems to be draggin’ their feet. An’ besides, she’s like a kid. I don’t mean childish, I don’t mean simple; I mean, like she believes in something even when there’s no evidence around for it, she keeps on believing until the evidence comes along. There must be a word for that.”

“Faith,” said Miss Phoebe faintly.

He came and sat down near her. “Don’t take it so hard, Miss Phoebe,” he said feelingly. “It’s just that you got to stand aside for a later model. If anybody’s going to do Yang work in a world like this, they got to get rid of a lot of deadwood. I don’t mean you’re deadwood. I mean a lot of your ideas are. Like that fellow was in jail about the little girl, you say
watch ’im!
one false move an’ back in the cage he goes. And all that guy wanted all his life was just to have a couple people around him who give a damn, ‘scuse me, Miss Phoebe. He never had that, so he took what he could get from whoever was weaker’n him, and that was only girls. You should see him now, he’s goin’ to be our best man.”

“You’re a child. You can’t undertake work like this. You don’t know the powers you’re playing with.”

“Right. We’re goin’ to make mistakes. Some of ’em will be real bloopers, an’ a lot of people are goin’ to get hurt. But we know what we’re doin’, we know what we want to do. We see some guy in Congress is featherin’ his own nest instead of workin’ for all the people—especially the guy who’s after power more than anything else—an’ we go after him. We fight whoever wants to burn books.
We fight whoever wants to make all the people think a certain way—any certain way. But sure, we’ll fumble some of the plays. An’ that’s where you come in. Are you on?”

“I—don’t quite—”

“We want your help,” he said, and bluntly added, “but if you can’t help, don’t hinder.”

“You’d want to work with me after I … Joyce, Joyce will hate me!”

“Joyce ain’t afraid of you.”

Her face crumpled. He patted her clumsily on the shoulder. “Come on, Miss Phoebe, what do you say?”

She sniffled, then turned red-rimmed, protruding eyes up to him. “If you want me. I’d have to … I’d like to talk to Joyce.”

“Okay. JOYCE!”

Miss Phoebe started. “She—she’s not—
oh
!” she cried as the doorknob turned. She said, “It’s locked.”

He grinned. “No it ain’t.”

Joyce came in. She went straight to Don, her eyes on his face, searching, and did not look around her until her hand was in his. Then she looked down at Miss Phoebe.

“This here, this is Joyce,” Don said.

Joyce and Miss Phoebe held each other’s eyes for a long moment, tense at first, gradually softening. At last Miss Phoebe made a tremulous smile.

“I’d better make some tea,” she said, gathering her feet under her.

“I’ll help,” said Joyce. She turned her face to the tea tray, which lifted into the air and floated to the kitchenette. She smiled at Miss Phoebe. “You tell me what to do.”

I
T WAS THE WAY THEY WERE BREATHING
,
she thought in despair and disgust, that was making her mind run on like this. The breathing was open throated in the darkness, consciously quiet though its intensity was almost beyond control. It was quiet because of the thin walls in this awful place, quiet to hide what should have been open and joyful. And as the blind compulsion for openness and joy rose, so rose the necessity for more control, more quiet. And then it was impossible to let her mind rest and ride, to bring in that rare ecstatic sunburst. The walls were growing thinner and thinner, surely—and outside people clustered, listening. More and more people, her mind told her madly. People with more and more ears, until she and Karl were trying to be quiet and secret in the center of a hollow sphere of great attentive ears, a mosaic of lobes and folds and inky orifices, all set together like fish scales
.…

Then the catch in his breath, the feeling of welcome, of gratitude … the wrong gratitude, the wrong relief, for it was based only on the fact that now it was over—but oh, be quiet
.

The heaviness now, the stillness … quiet. Real quiet, this now, and no pretense. She waited
.

Anger flicked at her. Enough is enough. This weight, this stillness
.…

Too much weight. Too much stillness
.…

“Karl.” She moved
.

“Karl!” She struggled, but quietly
.

Then she knew why he was so quiet and so still. She looked numbly at the simple fact, and for a long moment she breathed no more than he did, and that was not at all, for he was dead. And then the horror. And then the humiliation
.

Her impulse to scream died as abruptly as he had died, but the
sheer muscular spasm of it flung her away from him and out into the room. She stood cowering away from the cold, the rhythmic flare of an illuminated sign somewhere outside, and again she opened her throat so her gulping breath would be silent
.

She had to escape, and every living cell in her cried for shrieking flight. But no; somehow she had to get dressed. Somehow she had to let herself out, travel through corridors where the slightest glimpse of her would cause an alarm. There were lights, and a great glaring acreage of lobby to be crossed
.…

And somehow she did all these things, and got away into the blessed, noisy, uncaring city streets
.

Killilea sat at yet another bar, holding still another gin and water, wondering if this were going to be another of those nights.

Probably. When you’re looking for someone, and you won’t go to the police, and you know it’s no use to advertise in the papers because she never reads the papers, and you don’t know anyone who might know where she is, but you do know that if she is upset enough, unhappy enough, she drinks in bars—why then, you go to bars. You go to good ones and dirty ones, empty and bright and dusty and dark ones, night after night, never knowing if she’s going to pieces in the one you went to last night, or if she’ll be here tomorrow when you are somewhere else.

Someone sneezed explosively, and Killilea, whose nerves had always been good and who was, besides, about as detached from his immediate surroundings as a man can get, astonished himself by leaping off the bar stool. His drink went
pleup
and shot a little tongue of gin upwards, to lick the side of his neck coldly. He swore and wiped it with the back of his hand, and turned to look at the source of that monstrous human explosion.

He saw a tall young man with bright red ears and what had doubtless been a display handkerchief, with which he was scrubbing at the camel’s hair sleeve of a girl in the booth opposite. Killilea’s nostrils distended in mild disgust, while his lips spread in amusement just as mild. Sort of thing that might happen to anybody, he thought, but my God, that fellow must feel like a goon. And look at the guy
in the booth with the girl. Doesn’t know what to say. So what do you say? Don’t spit on my chick? Too late. I’m going to punch you in the mouth? That wouldn’t help. But if he doesn’t do something he can’t expect his lady-friend to be happy about it.

Killilea ordered another drink and glanced back to the booth. The tall young man was backing off in a veritable cloud of apologies; the girl was dabbing at her sleeve with a paper napkin, and her friend still sat speechless. He pulled his own handkerchief out, then put it back. He leaned forward to speak, said nothing, straightened up again, miserably.

“Fine Sir Galahad you turned out to be,” said the girl.

“I don’t think Galahad was ever faced with just this situation,” her escort replied reasonably. “I’m sorry.…”

“You’re sorry,” said the girl. “That helps a lot, don’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” the man said again. Then slightly annoyed, “What did you expect me to do? Sneeze right back at him?”

She curled her lip. “That would’ve been better than just doing nothing. Nothing, that’s you—
nothing
.”

“Look,” he said, half rising.

“Going someplace?” she asked nastily. “Go on then. I can get along. Beat it.”

“I’ll take you home,” he said.

“Not me you won’t.”

“Okay,” he said. He got out of the booth and looked at her, licking his lips unhappily. “Okay, then,” he said. He dropped a dollar bill on the table and walked toward the door. She looked after him, her lower lip protruding wet and sulky. “Thanks for the neighborhood movie,” she yelled at him, in a voice that carried all over the room. His shoulders gave a tight, embarrassed shrug. He grasped his lapels and gave his jacket a pathetic, angry little tug downward and left without looking back.

Killilea swung back to the bar and found he could see the booth in the mirror. “Big deal,” said the girl, speaking into her open compact as if it were a telephone.

The tall young man who had sneezed approached cautiously. “Miss—”

She looked up at him calculatingly.

“Miss, I couldn’t help hearing, and it was really my fault.”

“No it wasn’t,” she said. “Forget it! He didn’t mean nothing to me anyway.”

“You’re real nice about it anyway,” said the young man. “I wish I could do something.”

She looked at his face, his clothes. “Sit down,” she said.

“Waiter!” he said, and sat down.

Now Killilea looked into his drink and smiled. Smiles didn’t come easily these days and he welcomed them. He thought about the couple behind him. Suppose they had a great romance now. Suppose they got married and lived for years and years until they were old, and held hands on their golden wedding anniversary, and thought back to this night, this meeting: “First time you saw me, you spit on me.…” First time he saw Prue, she’d barged in on him in a men’s room. Crazy, crazy, the way things happen.