Fun House (12 page)

“Professor Fleischkopf,” Lord Alpha-B. called. The professor walked over to him, and the old man patted his shoulder. “You love to hunt, don’t you, my faithful boy?” And like a man with his dog I heard him utter the one word: “Fleischy!”

“Hunting!” Fleischy drooled. It was Fleischy the caveman, and although I had witnessed this quick-change before, my recent experiences at the Castle had about destroyed my self-control. I jumped back a step at the sight of that bent old magicientist in his black and purple cape, and the huge drooling two-footed dog next to him.

“What’s the trouble, old chap?” Lord Alpha-B. asked me.

“The drums,” I said weakly, evasively. Those mysterious drums that I had heard for the first time in the ancestor room were beating steadily in the jungle, whose tops I could see beyond the high wall that enclosed the estate.

“Drums!” Fleischy roared with laughter. “Got to have drums to keep the animals off-balance. Don’t nobody tell you different. All animals, they’re dummies. The wise elephant, the tricky tiger,” he laughed with contempt. “One minute they’re running, and the next they’re warm meat.” He strode over to me and lowered his grinning, slobbering face to mine. “This is a game preserve, you dummy. The animals can’t get out, see? Always they hear the drums, you dummy. You like to hunt?”

I was afraid to say no. I said nothing, and he pounded me on the shoulders. “We got everything here,” he gloated. “You want lions, we got lions. We got tigers and leopards and flamingoes if you want flamingoes although they’re not much good.”

“But we haven’t got the red fox of Sussex,” Lord Alpha-B. said moodily, “Ah, we might as well make the best of it. We’ll have a real old-fashioned hunt in honor of our guest. We’ll use rifles.”

“Rifles!” Fleischy shouted. “I like Flammos
¹
best.”

“You forget about Flammos. I said rifles. We’ll get some beaters and have a little sport.”

“Sport!” I said. I felt as I were struggling to escape a nightmare. “How can you think of sport when we don’t know what tomorrow’ll bring?”

“Spoken like a true unsportsman,” Lord Alpha-B. said, and chuckled an English chuckle at his English humor.

“When I think of the A-I-D!” I pleaded with him. “One man hunting every single human being in the world — ”

“You miserable rotter, will you stop reminding me of my mistake. Keep still, or I swear by all that’s holy, in the name of science itself, that I’ll hybridize you!” He turned his face towards me, and those eyes of his became visible as if I were seeing them in daylight, while the rest of him seemed to blacken out. He seemed disembodied, a pair of terrible eyes
¹
.

I was petrified, and when he led the way to a low white building I staggered after him. In the light of the two moons, the building looked like a hospital. It was pitch dark inside until the old magicientist lit his eyes up again. In the glare I stared at the beaters lined up against the wall. Metal and plastic automatons, imitations of the Ugandis and Zulus who had once hunted in the jungles, clubs and spears in their hands.

“Come over here!” Lord Alpha-B. called to me. “These are the beaters I prefer. I had them made up to my own order.”

In the light of his eyes I stared at a second row of beaters who dwarfed Fleischy-Fleischkopf in size, nine-footers if an inch. The first one wore the black robes of a judge, in its hand a three-foot object that looked like a document.

“Senator Clark Gable Fresset!” he chuckled. “I had my differences with Barnum, but I share his dislikes.” He tapped the three-foot document. “There he is with the subpoena he served on me. Do you know what Fleischy calls him?”

“Fido! That’s Fido!” Fleischy hollered.

The second giant-size beater turned out to be a very good imitation of Commissioner Sonata. In its outsized hand it was holding a rectangular cloth, a duplicate of a $10,000 bill. “That’s Rover,” Fleischy confided in me. “I had a nice lil dog called Rover once. I used to give him the guts of the things I killed. What a nice lil dog. I don’t know what got into me. Why did I have to eat that nice lil dog?”

The third beater held a five-foot brief case in its hand, a two-foot plastic cigar in its mouth. I stared with horror at its face. The short twisted nose, the hair standing up as if from a patchwork of scalps, the unmistakable psychiatric mouth! “Barnum Fly!” I said. “Why don’t we go after him?” I blurted and fearfully waited for the magicientist’s reaction.

But when he answered me, his voice was quiet. “Ah, the fox hunts of Sussex.”

Tears filled my eyes. After all, how often can a man be frustrated. I felt as if I were going mad, and maybe I was. What saved me was the thought that
they
wanted me to go mad — that this hunt was a hunt after my mind, another experiment.

Wiping my eyes, I saw Lord Alpha-B. reach up to the nose of the third beater. He slid the nose to one side, exposing a small panel with a switch. He lifted the switch and then slid the nose back into place. Fascinated, despite myself, for I knew that I ought to concentrate on the problem of making some contact with this ancestor worshipper
¹
, I observed him going through the nose routine with the Commissioner and the Senator.

“They’ll warm up shortly, old chap,” he remarked absentmindedly as if lost in thoughts of his own. Now and then he sighed and whispered something that could have been Sussex but I wasn’t sure.

The three beaters began to vibrate. Their rubbery bodies expanded and deflated, their arms began to swing. The Senator swung his subpoena, the Commissioner his banknote, Barnum F. his brief case. Suddenly, the cold electric glare of the magicientist’s eyes were dimmed by a green blaze bursting out of the eyes of the three beaters. The blaze vanished, appeared again.

“They’re working great!” Fleischy said. “What good boys!”

“Green is an interesting color,” his master remarked to me, “The green of nature, the green of envy.”

I looked at him and wondered if the real Barnum F., like the Senator, had been murdered? Murdered and the A-I-D locked up in one of the rooms in this castle of horrors? That would explain my kidnapping — for I was a menace to his plans. When I thought of his plans, my head began to spin. Plans for power, absolute power! And meanwile he was playing with me like a cat with a mouse — for here on the Outside even a power-crazy magicientist had to have his fun.

The green blaze was steady now, the arms of the three beaters swinging so fast they were blurs; the monsters began to rise up and down on their ball-and-socket toes. Their rubberized necks stretched, their chests blew up and contracted, and with each contraction, the buttons on their coats flicked on and off, green like their eyes, but much dimmer. And dimmest of all, the tip of Barnum F.’s two-foot cigar.

“How about a three hour safari, old chap?”

I answered in that same casual cold-tea voice. “Dr. Bangani, you’ve got the A-I-D and don’t deny it!”

“Two hours, old chap?” he asked with a cheery smile, and in the green light of the beaters’ eyes and buttons, he hurried over to what might have been a bulletin board except for the clock in its center. “A one hour hunt, you crazy rotter?” He adjusted the clock’s hands. “What would you like? Elephant, lion, buffalo?”

“All of them!” Fleischy said excitedly.

I forced myself to speak. “Dr. Bangani, tell me what you want and I’ll help you. Equality with the Rulers as you once said? What do you want?”

“What do you want, old chap? Elephant or lion or perhaps what we call a jungle combination. A couple of carnivores and several of the swifter grass-eaters?”

“Let’s have a lil of each!” Fleischy cried. “Some lions, some buffalo and maybe a zebra.”

“You keep still!” his master said, and at the bulletin board he pushed in three buttons marked: E, L and B. Then he raised two of the board’s three switches. In the green light I could see the letters on each. AMP — (M–N)
⁴
. The third switch 12z + R/v he let alone.

Watching him I was thinking that in one of his madder scientific moods, he might be setting off the A-I-D. He was an old man with only a few years to live. And if his plans for power weren’t successful….

(Posterity, if there will be a posterity, I can never forget that stooped silhouette at his bulletin board. The green eerie light of the beaters illuminating, not only the symbols noted in the above, mathematical, electronic, catatonic, but the symbol of symbols hanging so fatally over the world on the evening of June 28th.)

“Hey, get out of the way, dummy!” Fleischy bellowed, pushing me hard with both hands. I smashed into the wall, and when I turned I saw the three beaters streaking by like three pieces of lightning mounted on legs. “You dummy, they can do a hundred and fifty miles an hour
¹
.”

He grabbed my arm and dragged me past the Ugandi and Zulu-type beaters. “Those things ever get out of control?” I couldn’t help asking.

“There isn’t an ounce of Science in the rotter!” Lord Alpha-B. said disgustedly. “The three out there will give us a one hour hunt and when the time is up, they will return to their proper stations, faithful as hounds. There is nothing to worry about so carry on like a white man, you rotter.”

Fleischy pushed a rifle into my hand. “Let’s go, dummy. Get the 235
²
out of your pants.”

We ran out into the moonlight. The green-eyed beaters were nowhere in sight. We crossed a broad lawn to the wall that enclosed the estate. At its base was a small round transparent structure
³
. Fleischy dashed inside and turned a square knob. In a few seconds, a section of the wall swung open. By now of course I’d got used to walls lifting, sliding or disappearing, but I couldn’t guess at what had happened to the beaters.

“Where are they?”

“Outside,” Lord Alpha-B. replied laconically.

“Outside what? That wall’s at least thirty feet high!”

“They didn’t leap the wall, you silly rotter.”

“No?”

“No. They passed through the wall.”

I stood there thinking this over and staring at this hunting companion of mine and wishing I was back home where hunting was really a sport. Fleischy joined us, and his master snapped at him. “Professor, will you explain to this silly chap how the beaters passed through the wall?”

“Nothing is solid in this universe,” the professor lectured me. “Matter merely presents a solid appearance.”

Perhaps his master was bored but abruptly he called. “Fleischy!” and his two-legged dog was back with us.

“There’s all kinds of holes in matter, dummy. No matter how solid it seems it ain’t and that’s what’s the matter with matter. Those beaters, dummy? They’re made on the idea nothing’s solid, see. They can pass through any damn thing and the damn company
¹
that makes them charges a fortune for them, too. Now let’s not waste any more time, dummy.” Beyond the wall was the jungle. As we plunged into it, I felt like sneaking under some tree and blowing my brains out. For how was I ever going to reason with a split-brain? But something kept me going. Not courage or hope but just plain animal persistence — my two legs. From the branches of the forced-growth trees, creeping vines hung like ropes. And waiting for us in the thick bush were the beaters. I couldn’t make out their shapes, only the green of their glimmering buttons and inhuman eyes.

“Good boys!” Fleischy greeted them. “C’mon now, Fido, Rover, Rex! Sic ‘em!”

Rex, I thought with a shiver, that could only mean Barnum F.

But the green-eyed things didn’t seem to hear him; it was only when the Master of the Hunt called that they seemed to hear and understand. “There you are, you bloody beggars!” Lord Alpha-B. shouted. “Away with you! For King and Sussex!”

One second I saw them and the next they were gone, the three of us in pursuit, following that mechanico-atomo-electronic pack. We came to a path, a narrow path but made of concrete, and climbed up to a steep slope. And suddenly I smelled the breath of wild cruel Africa
²
— moldy and stinking of dead meat left for the maggots. I breathed in that jungle stench as the drums beat and Fleischy shouted, “Sic ‘em boys!”

Up the path we rushed to the top of the slope where a hunting station had been hacked out of the wilderness. In the moonlight of the African-artificial and the real moon, I could distinctly see a barbecue pit and several concrete benches. Lord Alpha-B. got up on one of the benches and began to halloo, feebly at first, for he was an old man and it took time before he recovered his breath.

Far away in the jungle I could see the green eyes of the beaters. Then we all heard it. An elephant in fear of its life.

“I want the first shot!” Fleischy bellowed.

“You rotter! Our guest has the privilege.”

I didn’t want that poor beast. Its snortings were enough to make a heart of stone bleed. I couldn’t have pitied it more if it had been human. Maybe my nerves were breaking, for as they shouted at me to get ready for the kill, I heard myself saying, “Why don’t you let us alone? All we want are a few simple things, a little security, a little love.”

“Philosophy is stupid at the moment of truth!” Lord Alpha-B. retorted.

I shrieked at what was coming up from the valley below. It was awful enough to see the beaters, their buttons and eyes glowing, but the elephant! It shone green, its huge body outlined in green, its ears green, its wildly undulating and immense nose like a green-tinted phosphorescent boa-constrictor.

I tossed my rifle away and ran. Behind me I heard a shot. Then silence except for the bom-bom-bom of the drums.

“Come out of that bloody funk, you bloody coward!” I heard a familiar voice, I lifted my head out of the shrub where I was hiding. Silhouetted against the velvet African-type night were two outlines, a short one and the gigantic one of the hybrid.

I stood up and approached them nervously. Below on the valley slope, the dead elephant lay in a pool of greenish light — its own. Further down the slope, the three green-eyed beaters stood as if waiting. “This you call sport,” I said heavily.

I refused to continue hunting with them. So while they got their mixed bag, I sat shivering on one of the benches. Once when Fleischy was the gun, his master tried to rally me. “Those beaters are harmless, old chap. They operate on a closed circuit. They beat up the game, drive it, and when the gun goes off, the circuit is broken. What’s there to worry about? The lighting effects? How else could we see the beasts at night? Nothing mysterious about it. Every drinking spring on this preserve is loaded with isotopes, the X-Ray type, and every beast to a greater or lesser degree is illuminated.”