Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (20 page)

He noted without surprise or regret that she'd caught the nice boy she'd gone after, as she caught everything she went after. And now nearer and nearer – the towel dropped from Pop's fingers – past the bandstand, past the short, chromium-fenced stretch of bar where the girls got the drinks for the tables, until she spun herself up onto the midmost barstool and smiled cruelly at him. "'Lo, Pops."

The nice boy sat down next to her and said, "Two brandies, Pops. Soda chasers." Then he took out a pack of cigarettes began to battle through his pockets for matches.

She touched his arm. "Get me my lighter, Pops," she said.

Pops shook.

She leaned forward a little. The smile left her face. "I said get me my lighter, Pops."

He ducked like a man being shot at. His numb hands found the cigar box under the bar. There was something small and black inside. He grabbed it up as if it were a spider and thrust it down blindly on the bar, jerked back his hand. Bobby picked it up and flicked her thumb and lifted a small yellow flame to the nice boy's cigarette. The nice boy smiled at her lovingly and then asked, "Hey, Pops, what about our drinks?"

For Martin, the crystal world was getting to be something of a china shop. Stronger and stronger, slowly and pleasurably working toward a climax like the jazz, he could feel the urge toward wild and happy action. Masculine action, straight-armed, knife-edged, dramatic, destroying or loving half to death everything around him. Waiting for the inevitable – whatever it was would be – he almost gloated.

The old man half spilled their drinks, he was in such a hurry setting them down. Pops really did seem a bit nuts, just like Sol had said, and Martin stopped the remark he'd half intended to make about finding Pops' girl. Instead, he looked at Bobby.

"You drink mine, lover," she said, leaning close to be heard over the loud music, and again he saw the scar. "I've had enough."

Martin didn't mind. The double brandy burned icily along his nerves, building higher the cool flame of savagery that was fanned by the band blaring derision at the haughty heads and high towers of civilization.

A burly man, who was taking up a little too much room beside Martin, caught Sol's attention as the latter passed inside the bar, and said, "So far you're winning, it's still empty." Sol nodded, smiled, and whispered some witticism. The burly man laughed, and in appreciation said a dirty word.

Martin tapped his shoulder. "I'll trouble you not to use that sort of language in front of my girl."

The burly man looked at him and beyond him, said, "You're drunk, Joe," and turned away.

Martin tapped his shoulder again. "I said I'd trouble you."

"You will, Joe, if you keep it up," the burly man told him, keeping a poker face. "Where is this girl you're talking about? In the washroom? I tell you, Joe, you're drunk."

"She's sitting right beside me," Martin said, enunciating each word with care and staring grimly into the eyes of the poker face.

The burly man smiled. He seemed suddenly amused. "Okay, Joe," he said, "let's investigate this girl of yours. What's she like? Describe her to me."

"Why, you–" Martin began, drawing back his arm.

Bobby caught hold of it. "No, lover," she said in a curiously intent voice. "Do as he says."

"Why the devil–"

"Please, lover," she told him. She was smiling tightly. Her eyes were gleaming. "Do just as he says."

Martin shrugged. His own smile was tight as he turned back to the burly man. "She's about twenty. She's got hair like pale gold. She looks a bit like Veronica Lake. She's dressed in black and she's got a black cigarette lighter."

Martin paused. Something in the poker face had changed. Perhaps it was a shade less ruddy. Bobby was tugging at his arm.

"You haven't told him about the scar," she said excitedly.

He looked at her, frowning.

"Tell him about the scar, too."

"Oh, yes," he said, "and she's got the faintest scar running down from her left temple over her left eyelid and the bridge of her nose, and across her right cheek to the lobe of her–"

He stopped abruptly. The poker face was ashen, its lips were working. Then a red tide started to flood up into it, the eyes began to look murder.

Martin could feel Bobby's warm breath in his ear, the flick of her wet tongue. "Now, lover. Get him now. That's Jeff."

Swiftly, yet very deliberately, Martin shattered the rim of his chaser glass against the shot glass and jammed it into the burly man's flushing face.

A shriek that wasn't in the score came out of the clarinet. Someone in the booths screamed hysterically. A barstool went over as someone else cringed away. Pops screamed. Then everything was whirling movement and yells, grabbing hands and hurtling shoulders, scrambles and sprawls, crashes and thumps, flashes of darkness and light, hot breaths and cold drafts, until Martin realized that he was running with Bobby beside him through gray pools of street light, around a corner into a darker street, around another corner ...

Martin stopped, dragging Bobby to a stop by her wrist. Her dress had fallen open. He could glimpse her small breasts. He grabbed her in his arms and buried his face in her warm neck, sucking in the sweet, heavy reek of gardenia.

She pulled away from him convulsively. "Come on, lover," she gasped in an agony of impatience. "Hurry, lover, hurry."

And they were running again. Another block and she led him up some hollowed steps and past a glass door and tarnished brass mailboxes and up a worn-carpeted stair. She fumbled at a door in a frenzy of haste, threw it open. He followed her into darkness.

"Oh, lover, hurry," she threw to him.

He slammed the door.

Then it came to him, and it stopped him in his tracks. The awful stench. There was gardenia in it, but that was the smallest part. It was an elaboration of all that is decayed and rotten in gardenia, swollen to an unbearable putrescence.

"Come to me, lover," he heard her cry. "Hurry, hurry, lover, hurry – what's the matter?"

The light went on. The room was small and dingy with table and chairs in the center and dark, overstuffed things back against the walls. Bobby dropped to the sagging sofa. Her face was white, taut, apprehensive.

"What did you say?" she asked him.

"That awful stink," he told her, involuntarily grimacing his distaste. "There must be something dead in here."

Suddenly her face turned to hate. "Get out!"

"Bobby," he pleaded, shocked. "Don't get angry. It's not your fault."

"Get out!"

"Bobby, what's the matter? Are you sick? You look green."

"
Get out!
"

"Bobby, what are you doing to your face? What's happened to you?
Bobby! BOBBY!
"

 

Pops spun the glass against the towel with practiced rhythm. He eyed the two girls on the opposite side of the bar with the fatherliness of an old and snub-nosed satyr. He drew out the moment as long as he could.

"Yep," he said finally, "it wasn't half an hour after he screwed the glass in that guy's face that the police picked him up in the street outside her apartment, screaming and gibbering like a baboon. At first they were sure he was the one who killed her, and I guess they gave him a real going-over. But then it turned out he had an iron-clad alibi for the time of the crime."

"Really?" the redhead asked.

Pops nodded. "Sure thing. Know who really did it? They found out."

"Who?" the cute little brunette prompted.

"The same guy that got the glass in the face," Pops announced triumphantly. "This Jeff Cooper fellow. Seems he was some sort of a racketeer. Got to know this Bobby in Michigan City. They had a fight up there, don't know what, guess maybe she was two-timing him. Anyway, she thought he was over being mad, and he let her think so. He brought her down to Chicago, took her to this apartment he had, and beat her to death.

"That's right," the old man affirmed, rubbing it in when the cute little brunette winced. "Beat her to death with a beer bottle."

The redhead inquired curiously. "Did she ever come here, Pops? Did you ever see her?"

For a moment the glass in Pops' towel stopped twirling. Then he pursed his lips. "Nope," he said emphatically, "I couldn't have. 'Cause he murdered her the night he

brought her down to Chicago. And that was a week before they found her." He chuckled. "A few days more and it would have been the sanitary inspectors who discovered the body – or the garbage man."

He leaned forward, smiling, waiting until the cute brunette had lifted her unwilling fascinated eyes. "Incidentally, that's why they couldn't pin it on this Martin Bellows kid. A week before – at the time she was killed – he was hundreds of miles away."

He twirled the gleaming glass. He noticed that the cute brunette was still intently watching him. "Yep," he said reflectively, "it was quite a job that other guy did on her. Beat her to death with a beer bottle. Broke the bottle doing it. One of the last swipes he gave her laid her face open all the way from her left temple to her right ear."

 

 

 

THE EERIEST RUINED DAWN WORLD

 

THE ASTROGATOR'S Dear Friend asked, "But of all the worlds you found where awareness had budded and then destroyed itself – and there were more of them than I had realized! – which was the most interesting?"

"I can't tell you that, you cold-blooded fish!" the Astrogator replied. "They were all equally interesting ... and equally sad." He paused. "But I can tell you which was the strangest – no, that's not the word."

"The eeriest," the Planetographer supplied.

"Yes, that describes it," the Robotist agreed, "provided you were both referring to the star we called Lonely and its planet Hope. I thought so! Yes, the eeriest!"

"Oh, good!" the Robotist's Fond Companion urged. "I love spooky stories."

"Tales of death and desolation – by all means!" the Planetographer's Sweet Love chimed, smacking her lips.

"Morbid monster!" he told her playfully.

"Prurient parasite!" she joked back.

"Which of us should begin?" the Astrogator asked.

"You!" they all chorused: his two fellow explorers and the stay-at-home mates of all three of them were gathered together in convivial and truly symbiotic friendship for the first time since the three explorers' great voyaging.

The Astrogator finished his drink, was poured another, and began, "We surfaced from hyperspace out in the Arm. Our destination was a star in a tiny cluster, a star so small and somehow woebegone we called her Lonely."

"Out in the Arm!" his Dear Friend commented. "Then it was during the period when we were out of telepathic contact entirely.
Our
lonely time."

"That's right. As we approached her, we studied her planets. The Seventh was trebly ringed, quite a rarity. The Fifth was long since shattered, almost pulverized. An old deep nuclear suicide, or else a dual planet, inharmoniously paired. Analysis of data we recorded may still tell."

"Or perhaps (remotely possible) he encountered a small dark wanderer passing through Lonely's space," the Planetographer put in.

"What a way to go!" his Sweet Love said. "Serve him right for playing around."

"No fault of his – he'd be a sitting duck."

"Who's telling this?" the Astrogator complained. "Now moving in closer to Lonely, we found her Third altogether ideal for life, right in the middle of the viable volume. And he was paired, with tides to stir his atmosphere and waters – no chance of stagnation. The secondary was quite small, had long ago died a natural death–"

"Perhaps," the Planetographer interjected.

The other continued without comment, "–but the primary was the right size with a rich atmosphere, so we named him Hope. And there were radiations patterned by intelligence coming from him. That seemed conclusive, and yet" – he paused – "and yet almost from the start there was something about him that seemed wrong."

He paused again. The Planetographer nodded and said, "His atmosphere was rich, all right – too rich in hydrocarbons to my taste."

The Robotist observed, "And as for those radiations indicating intelligence, well, there began to be a sameness about them, a lack of interplay, a lack of the day-to-day dynamisms characteristic of mental life in ferment."

"A time of cultural calm?" his Fond Companion suggested. "A quiet period?"

"We thought so for a while, my dear."

The Astrogator went on, "I put
Quester
into a parking orbit inn Three's natural period of rotation so that our ship hung above one meridian, shuttling north and south through an arc of about one-fourth of a circle as Three spun."

He looked toward the Planetographer across the table floating between them.

"Three showed at least three times as much ocean as land," the latter took up. "Our daily swing took us across two continents joined by a serpentine isthmus, from the east coast of the northern continent to the west coast of the southern near its tip, and back again. Three was, or had been, inhabited all right, and by beings of considerable if strange mentation, for we passed over numerous cities–"

"Cities? What are those?" the Astrogator's Dear Friend wanted to know.

"Abnormal concentrations of dwellings and other structures. Inorganic cancers. As I was saying – over numerous cities and great wide roads and paved flat fields that might have been for the mass celebration of religious rites, or else for the launching and landing of large winged vehicles. In fact, the inhabitants of Three seemed to have had a passion for sealing in the surfaces of their continents with various inorganic materials."

"How very strange," the Robotist's Fond Companion observed.

"Yes, indeed. At the north end of our daily swing there was an especially large concentration of cities – a cluster of inorganic boils, you might say – beside and in the ocean's edge. The one of these containing the most monstrous structures was a long narrow island surrounded by a mighty dike at least one-fourth the height of the tallest structures it guarded – and they were tall!–and against the top of which, or near, the dark, restless oceanic waters ceaselessly lapped and crashed. This city stood just off the continent. A very deep river led down to it from the north, while farther to the northwest lay five great, swollen lakes, half run together."