Abnormal Occurrences (20 page)

Charlie had remained a bachelor, because in his earlier years the occasional professional supplied all he needed of femininity. He had always disliked talking to women, believing them, however pleasant they appeared, to be secretly critical of him. Finally the day came when he found himself totally devoid of even the feeble physical need the other sex had sometimes stirred in him, and from then on his only association with the human race was as flunky to master or mistress, and he had hundreds of those.

But Charlie’s hatred might well have remained passive, impotent, and routine in a city full of such types, had he not, apparently by chance, discovered a device with which to express it effectively, even devastatingly, and incur no personal risk whatever. This discovery was preceded (one evening after an especially obnoxious day in which a faulty dryer in the laundry room had burned up a load of clothing belonging to a woman who was peevish and importunate in the best of times) by Charlie’s uttering a sequence of oaths, followed by a fervent wish that he had some clean, quiet, secret means by which with impunity, he could rid the world of persons who annoyed him.

It was the next morning, while wrestling the garbage cans out to the sidewalk in preparation for the visit of the Sanitation truck—singlehandedly: his wretched helper had once again called in sick—that at the top of a lidless container Charlie found his weapon, a red-and-blue plastic toy pistol, a so-called Galaxy Disintegrator modeled after one brandished by the hero in a blockbuster science-fiction movie. This had obviously been discarded by one of the innumerable spoiled children who lived in the building. It was probably not even out of order: the kid had simply been bored. Charlie seized it by the butt, which was molded of flimsy, almost weightless plastic, and probed the wedge-shaped trigger, with its visible spring. No doubt it made a clicking sound when “fired.”

He had not been especially childish even as a little boy, and whatever playfulness he had known had long since been exhausted, yet now, almost lightheartedly, Charlie raised the toy and pointed it at the approaching mailman, a malicious individual who loved to load building supers with armloads of packages too large for the postal boxes.

At the moment this worthy was already extending toward Charlie a document to be signed—perhaps a registered letter containing a subpoena for a man who was delinquent with his child-support payments: you could imagine his gratitude to the super for accepting the envelope.

“Hi, Charlie,” cried the mailman, making his habitual derisive grin and, if precedent were to be followed, preparing one of his insulting wisecracks, e.g., “Still working on your first million?”

“So long, sucker,” said Charlie. He pulled the trigger of the toy weapon, which produced the expected clicking sound, like that made by the tongue against the roof of the mouth, and the mailman instantly disappeared, without even the proverbial puff of smoke!

Charlie was badly frightened, not because he believed for a moment that he had actually caused the postman to disintegrate into particles too small to be detected by the eye, but rather because he suspected that his mind had cracked, that he had suffered a hallucination. For he had always been a very literal man, with no imagination and with no respect for anybody who had one.

So now he was really worried about his sanity, and he even went so far as to make an emergency appointment with the psychiatrist who occupied one of the ground-floor offices in the apartment building. “Well, well, uh, Charlie, isn’t it?” said this practitioner, when the super was seated before his desk. “Before we get down to business, I’d like to point out that the lobby could use a good mopping.”

Charlie told this doctor, whose name was Hilfer, about the remarkable fantasy he had suffered.

Dr. Hilfer asked: “Has this mailman turned up since?”

“No, sir. But then he’s not due again till tomorrow morning.”

Hilfer narrowed his eyes. “You’re saying you murdered him, aren’t you, Charlie?” At the super’s gasping attempts to protest, the doctor raised a hand. “No, no. We’re not afraid to face the truth here. You did well in coming immediately to me. You’ll never spend a night in jail, I’ll promise you that.” He rose, finished with Charlie until the next appointment.

Charlie asked him to specify his fee. When Dr. Hilfer said that, because of the courtesy discount extended to employees of the building, it was only two hundred dollars per visit, Charlie pulled out the Space Disintegrator and made the psychiatrist vanish.

With this disappearance of another person at whom he had pointed the toy weapon, the super began to think that perhaps he was not imagining things, that maybe the Disintegrator
was
an efficacious means for getting rid of human beings without any attendant problems, not even the least destruction of property.

He tried it next on a boy of twelve, an exceptionally obnoxious youth in a building full of such, and the Doberman which the lad allowed, even encouraged, to disregard the law against soiling the sidewalks.
Click-click
, another problem was removed. But Charlie was not a cruel man: the kid had parents by whom he would have been missed. The super therefore considerately erased (as he had come to call it) Mr. and Mrs. Hochman as well.

And also, in a development not related to the foregoing, all persons who lived on the south corridor of the fourth floor were caused to disappear, for one or more of them persistently fouled the floor there with a dark, viscous liquid very like motor oil and also, sometimes, a very fine gravel. And soon to vanish was a wealthy man who lived in one of the penthouses and yet always tipped Charlie as though he resided in a studio apartment.

During the next few days Charlie also erased four flight attendants who shared an apartment: they were old offenders against the plumbing, no sink or washstand would long run free if that hairy quartet were allowed access to it. And he expunged a pair of handsome men who shared one-bedroom quarters and had never, in four years, been seen to admit a female person onto their premises: Charlie had never subscribed to the principle of live and let. And the following persons were never seen again after he had pointed the Disintegrator at them: his feckless assistant, who though twenty years younger always allowed Charlie to do the dirtier and heavier tasks; the morning doorman, who believed that his uniform made him socially superior to a super in dark-green denim; a passing stranger who spat upon the sidewalk; the heavy, sour man who had replaced the mail carrier who had been Charlie’s first prey; and a very fat woman who was so tasteless as to cram herself into designer jeans and a too-snug T-shirt.

At this point he ceased to keep a tally on his victims—if they could be so designated, though there was no evidence that they suffered a split-second of pain. The Disintegrator seemed simply to return them to the nothingness from which they had originally come as newborn infants. This would not seem to be murder. Charlie supposed that there probably wasn’t even a law against it, because it was unprecedented. But surely there would be one once it was known to be happening. Therefore only trouble could come from anybody’s learning about the Disintegrator.

Fortunately the plastic pistol would be neither difficult to conceal nor to justify having if it were detected. A super routinely collected lost toys or saw that the Sanitation Department took away the discarded ones. There could never be any reason why the Disintegrator would be identified for what it was. Only those who had been erased by it would be privy to its extraordinary power—and perhaps not even them, were they somehow brought back from the void. Most of the persons at whom Charlie had pointed it had not been looking his way at the time. Those who had been, like the first mailman, would have seen nothing but the red plastic muzzle, from which came no slug or noise or visible emanation before its target vanished utterly.

There had never been anything of this sort in the history of man, and Charlie was aware that he could have used the Disintegrator to rule the world! He might well have set out to do that had he been younger, but now his digestion was gone and his lower back sometimes ached so much he couldn’t get to sleep at night, and he really did not yearn for positive power. Just getting rid of people that annoyed him was a great advantage, and he asked for nothing more than peace in his declining years.

However, a strange state of affairs had come into being. Now that Charlie could erase those who bothered him, there were more of them all the time. Whereas when he had been helpless against them, relatively few persons had seriously bothered him on any given day, now, when he had the means to rub out anyone who offended him, such individuals appeared in great numbers wherever he went. At the delicatessen, for example, while waiting in line for a brisket on rye, mustard only, the super was jostled savagely, and at least one other customer unfairly jumped his proper place in line, and when Charlie finally reached the counterman he was insulted by him for being too slow in giving the order (being momentarily speechless with indignation). Really the only way to deal with this situation was to erase everybody in the deli—a job which, amazingly, took only a few pulls of the trigger: the Disintegrator could handle any number of persons who were in line with its muzzle. Charlie was soon to test its efficacy on a line before the ticket window at the ballpark, taking out twenty-three persons with one squeeze. Apparently it was like x-ray, going straight through living tissue, but having no effect on nonorganic matter.

Before many days had passed, the effects of Charlie’s erasures began to be evident. Fewer and fewer people were to be seen in the building, and the survivors began to wonder audibly what had happened to the missing tenants. Sometimes they unwittingly asked the only man who could have explained: “Hey, Charlie, this place is beginning to look deserted, don’t you think?” Or, “What’s become of everybody, Charlie?”

At first the super would cast doubt on their powers of observation. “Take it from me, there’s more people around here every day. You just missed a big crowd.” Next, when the reduction in population had become too drastic to ignore, Charlie would say something like: “Oh, everybody gets out of here on weekends nowadays.” And if the response was: “But, Charlie, today’s Wednesday,” he might answer: “They stretch it to the breaking point, don’t they?” and shake his head over the decadence of the typical contemporary jobholder. Finally when nothing he could dream up would satisfy the inquirer, Charlie would shrug and reach for the Disintegrator, and so went, one by one, or sometimes little group by group, the remaining tenants, and soon the entire building was devoid of humanity except for Charlie himself.

Now, certainly, the people who had lived there had relatives and friends who missed them, and many individuals came to the building in search of the whereabouts of the former tenants, including representatives of the large real-estate firm that owned the apartment house. Charlie erased all these investigators, and then went downtown to the main office of the firm, his employers, and caused everyone there to disappear.

Charlie continued in this fashion for several months, always finding new uses for the Disintegrator. For example, he was aware that even with all his power he was still not desirable to the kind of women, namely young and pretty ones, who now had begun to attract him. He might spot some knockout accompanied by a man and erase the latter, but the girl even so would see no reason why she should take Charlie as replacement for her vanished companion. But one day the super got the idea of replacing
all
the other males in the city who were younger and/or better-looking than he, and he set about making wholesale erasures with his Disintegrator. This took a few weeks, despite the effectiveness of his device, for there were hundreds of thousands of persons he had to get rid of, but finally it was done, and Charlie was obviously, by default, the best date a woman could find in a city of the aged, the physically disabled, and the harmless mental defectives, and he could take his pick, with the exception of the contrary ones who said that if
he
was all that was offered they could survive without male friendship—naturally, he erased this sort immediately on hearing that argument.

But at about this time life for Charlie began to be dissatisfying even though everything was going his way, for in the absence of all able-bodied and sane men a good many of the practical affairs of the city were in a mess. When there was trouble at a power plant it could not be corrected for months, owing to the small number of female electrical technicians, and Charlie soon found his own building without lights, air conditioning, TV, or any of the other conveniences afforded by electricity. Most restaurants were closed for the same reason, added to which was the utter absence of garbage-removal workers. The few woman bus- and taxi-drivers were so overworked that most of them quit their jobs, and with the disappearance of gas-truck drivers, station personnel and mechanics, the vehicles could not run long anyway, and of course the same was true of private cars.

Some of the deprivations did not matter that much: most of the police were gone, but so were almost all of the criminals, except for a few tough girls whom Charlie found it simple to erase when he encountered them.

Up to the time of the erasure of the men, television, radio, and the press had given daily attention to the disappearance of so much of the city’s population, and there were all sorts of theories as to what and why it was happening, but after the power failures this stopped owing to the inability of the information media to continue to function. However, the girls dated by Charlie talked of no other subject, except the inevitable matter of the latest problem such as lack of refrigeration, so no food could be had but the canned and dehydrated stuff.

“Charlie,” they would say, “have you heard this theory? That all the guys, every one, turned homosexual and went to some community in the desert where they won’t have to listen to reproaches?”

“Hell with that,” Charlie would growl. “Don’t bother me about that!” For with all those lonely women at his disposal, he didn’t have to worry about being rude.