The Fredric Brown Megapack (10 page)

Kane tilted the silver flask for the last drop and handed it back. “You’ll play St. Bernard again?”

* * * *

“I went to the Forty-fourth,” Mearson said. “The incident you described to me is on the blotter, all right. And I talked to one of the two coppers who went back with you to the scene of the—uh—back to the car. Your
reporting
of the accident was real, no question of that.”

“I’ll start where I left off,” Kane said. “Ontology, the study of the nature of reality. In reading up on it, I came across solipsism, which originated with the Greeks. It is the belief that the entire universe is the product of one’s imagination—in my case,
my
imagination. That I myself am the only concrete reality, and that all things and all other people exist only in my mind.”

Mearson frowned. “So then the girl on the bicycle, having only an imaginary existence to begin with, ceased to exist—uh,
retroactively
, as of the moment you killed her? Leaving no trace behind her, except a memory in your mind, of ever having existed?”

“That possibility occurred to me, and I decided to do something which I thought would verify or disprove it. Specifically, to commit a murder, deliberately, to see what would happen.”

“But—but Larry, murders happen every day, people are killed every day, and don’t vanish retroactively and leave no trace behind them.”

“But they were not killed by
me
,” Kane said earnestly. “And if the universe is a product of my imagination, that should make a difference. The girl on the bicycle is the first person I ever killed.”

Mearson sighed. “So you decided to check by committing a murder. And shot Queenie Quinn. But why didn’t she—?”

“No, no, no,” Kane interrupted. “I committed another first, a month or so ago. A man. A man—and there’s no use my telling you his name or anything about him because, as of now, he never existed, like the girl on the bicycle.

“But of course I didn’t
know
it would happen that way, so I didn’t simply kill him openly, as I did the stripper. I took careful precautions, so if his body
had
been found, the police would never have apprehended
me
as the killer.

“But after I killed him, well—he just never had existed, and I thought that my theory was confirmed. After that I carried a gun, thinking that I could kill with impunity any time I wanted to—and that it wouldn’t matter, wouldn’t be immoral even, because anyone I killed didn’t really exist anyway except in my mind.”

“Ummm,” said Mearson.

“Ordinarily, Morty,” Kane said, “I’m a pretty even tempered guy. Night before last was the first time I used the gun. When that damn stripper hit me, she hit
hard
, a roundhouse swing. It blinded me for the moment, and I just reacted automatically in pulling out the gun and shooting her.”

“Ummm,” the attorney said. “And Queenie Quinn turned out to be for real, and you’re in jail for murder, and doesn’t that blow your solipsism theory sky-high?”

Kane frowned. “It certainly modifies it. I’ve been thinking a lot since I was arrested, and here’s what I’ve come up with. If Queenie was real—and obviously she was—then I was not, and probably am not, the
only
real person. There are real people and unreal ones, ones that exist only in the imagination of the real ones. How many, I don’t know. Maybe only a few, maybe thousands, even millions. My sampling—three people, of whom one turned out to have been real—is too small to be significant.”

“But why? Why should there be a duality like that?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” Kane frowned. “I’ve had some pretty wild thoughts, but any one of them would be just a guess. Like a conspiracy—but a conspiracy against
whom
? Or
what
? And
all
of the real ones couldn’t be in on the conspiracy, because I’m not.”

He chuckled without humor. “I had a really far-out dream about it last night, one of those confused, mixed-up dreams that you can’t really tell anybody, because they have no continuity, just a series of impressions. Something about a conspiracy and a reality file that lists the names of all the real people and keeps them real. And—here’s a dream pun for you—reality is really run by a chain, only they’re not known to be a chain, of reality companies, one in each city. Of course they deal in real estate too, as a front. And—oh hell, it’s all too confused even to try to tell.

“Well, Morty, that’s it. And my guess is that you’ll tell me my only defense is an insanity plea—and you’ll be right because, damn it, if
I am
sane I
am
a murderer. First degree and without extenuating circumstances. So?”

“So,” said Mearson. He doodled a moment with a gold pencil and then looked up. “The head-shrinker you went to for a while—his name wasn’t Galbraith, was it?”

Kane shook his head.

“Good. Doc Galbraith is a friend of mine and the best forensic psychiatrist in the city, maybe in the country. Has worked with me on a dozen cases, and we’ve won all of them. I’d like his opinion before I even start to map out a defense. Will you talk to him, be completely frank with him, if I send him around to see you?”

“Of course. Uh—will you ask him to do me a favor?”

“Probably. What is it?”

“Lend him your flask and ask him to bring it filled. You’ve no idea how much more nearly pleasant it makes these interviews.”

* * * *

The intercom on Mortimer Mearson’s desk buzzed, and he pressed the button on it that would bring his secretary’s voice in. “Dr. Galbraith to see you, sir.” Mearson told her to send him in at once.

“Hi, Doc,” Mearson said. “Take a load off your feet and tell all.”

Galbraith took the load off his feet and lighted a cigarette before he spoke. “Puzzling for a while,” he said. “I didn’t get the answer till I went into medical history with him. While playing polo at age twenty-two, he had a fall and got a whop on the head with a mallet that caused a bad concussion and subsequent amnesia. Complete at first, but gradually his memory came back completely up to early adolescence. Pretty spotty between then and the time of the injury.”

“Good God, the indoctrination period.”

“Exactly. Oh, he has flashes—like the dream he told you about. He could be rehabilitated—but I’m afraid it’s too late now. If only we’d caught him before he committed an overt murder— But we can’t possibly risk putting his story on record now, even as an insanity defense. So.”

“So,” Mearson said. “I’ll make the call now. And then go see him again. Hate to, but it’s got to be done.”

He pushed a button on the intercom. “Dorothy, get me Mr. Hodge at the Midland Realty Company. When you get him, put the call on my private line.”

Galbraith left while he was waiting, and a moment later one of his phones rang and he picked it up.

“Hodge?” he said, “Mearson here. Your phone secure?… Good. Code eighty-four. Remove the card of Lorenz Kane—L-o-r-e-n-z K-a-n-e—from the reality file at once… Yes, it’s necessary and an emergency. I’ll submit a report tomorrow.”

He took a pistol from a desk drawer and a taxi to the courthouse. He arranged an audience with his client, and as soon as Kane came through the door—there was no use waiting—he shot him dead. He waited the minute it always took for the body to vanish, and then went upstairs to the chambers of Judge Amanda Hayes to make a final check.

“Hi, Your Honor,” he said. “Somebody recently was telling me about a man named Lorenz Kane, and I don’t remember who it was. Was it you?”

“Never heard the name, Morty. It wasn’t me.”

“You mean ‘It wasn’t I.’ Must’ve been someone else. Thanks, Your Judgeship. Be seeing you.”

RECESSIONAL

The king my liege lord is a discouraged man. We understand and do not blame him, for the war has been long and bitter and there are so pathetically few of us left, yet we wish that it were not so. We sympathize with him for having lost his Queen, and we too all loved her—but since the Queen of the Blacks died with her, her loss does not mean the loss of the war. Yet our King, he who should be a tower of strength, smiles weakly and his words of attempted encouragement to us ring false in our ears because we hear in his voice the undertones of fear and defeat. Yet we love him and we die for him, one by one.

One by one we die in his defense, here upon this blooded bitter field, churned muddy by the horses of the Knights—while they lived; they are dead now, both ours and the Black ones—and will there be an end, a victory?

We can only have faith, and never become cynics and heretics, like my poor fellow Bishop Tibault. “We fight and die; we know not why,” he once whispered to me, earlier in the war at a time when we stood side by side defending our King while the battle raged in a far corner of the field.

But that was only the beginning of his heresy. He had stopped believing in a God and had come to believe in gods, gods who play a game with us and care nothing for us as persons. Worse, he believed that our moves are not our own, that we are but puppets fighting in a useless war. Still worse—and how absurd!—that White is not necessarily good and Black is not necessarily evil, that on the cosmic scale it does not matter who wins the war!

Of course it was only to me, and only in whispers, that he said these things. He knew his duties as a bishop. He fought bravely. And died bravely, that very day, impaled upon the lance of a Black Knight. I prayed for him:
God, rest his soul and grant him peace; he meant not what he said.

Without faith we are nothing. How could Tibault have been so wrong? White must win. Victory is the only thing that can save us. Without victory our companions who have died, those who here upon this embattled field have given their lives that we may live, shall have died in vain.
Et tu,
Tibault.

And you were wrong, so wrong. There is a God, and so great a God that He will forgive your heresy, because there was no evil in you, Tibault, except as doubt—no, doubt is error but it is not evil.

Without faith we are noth—

But something is happening! Our Rook, he who was on the Queen’s side of the field in the Beginning, swoops toward the evil Black King, our enemy. The villainous one is under attack—and cannot escape. We have won! We have won!

A voice in the sky says calmly, “Checkmate.”

We have won! The war, this bitter stricken field, was
not
in vain. Tibault, you were wrong, you were—

But what is happening now? The very Earth tilts; one side of the battlefield rises and we are sliding—White and Black alike into—

—into a monstrous
box
and I see that it is a mass coffin in which already lie dead—

IT IS NOT FAIR; WE WON! GOD, WAS TIBAULT RIGHT? IT IS NOT JUST; WE WON!

The King, my liege lord, is sliding too across the squares—

IT IS NOT JUST; IT IS NOT
RIGHT
; IT IS NOT…

EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK

(In collaboration with Carl Onspaugh)

His name was Dooley Hanks and he was One of Us, by which I mean that he was partly a paranoiac, partly a schizophrenic, and mostly a nut with a strong
idée fixe
, an obsession. His obsession was that someday he’d find The Sound that he’d been looking for all his life, or at least all of his life since twenty years ago, in his teens, when he had acquired a clarinet and learned how to play it. Truth to tell, he was only an average musician, but the clarinet was his rod and staff, and it was the broomstick that enabled him to travel over the face of Earth, on all the continents, seeking The Sound. Playing a gig here and a gig there, and then, when he was ahead by a few dollars or pounds or drachmas or rubles he’d take a walking tour until his money started to run out, then start for the nearest city big enough to let him find another gig.

He didn’t know what The Sound would sound like, but he knew that he’d know it when he heard it. Three times he’d
thought
he’d found it. Once, in Australia, the first time he’d heard a bull-roarer. Once, in Calcutta, in the sound of a musette played by a fakir to charm a cobra. And once, west of Nairobi, in the blending of a hyena’s laughter with the voice of a lion. But the bull-roarer, on second hearing, was just a noise; the musette, when he’d bought it from the fakir for twenty rupees and had taken it home, had turned out to be only a crude and raucous type of reed instrument with little range and not even a chromatic scale; the jungle sounds had resolved themselves finally into simple lion roars and hyena laughs, not at all The Sound.

Actually Dooley Hanks had a great and rare talent that could have meant much more to him than his clarinet, a gift of tongues. He knew dozens of languages and spoke them all fluently, idiomatically and without accent. A few weeks in any country was enough for him to pick up the language and speak it like a native. But he had never tried to cash in on this talent, and never would. Mediocre player though he was, the clarinet was his love.

Currently, the language he had just mastered was German, picked up in three weeks of playing with a combo in a
beerstube
in Hannover, West Germany. And the money in his pocket, such as it was, was in marks. And at the end of a day of hiking, augmented by one fairly long lift in a Volkswagen, he stood in moonlight on the banks of the Weser River. Wearing his hiking clothes and with his working clothes, his good suit, in a haversack on his back. His clarinet case in his hand; he always carried it so, never trusting it to a suitcase, when he used one, or to a haversack when he was hiking.

Driven by a demon, and feeling suddenly an excitement that must be, that could only be, a hunch, a feeling that at long last he was really about to find The Sound. He was trembling a little; he’d never had the hunch this strongly before, not even with the lions and the hyenas, and that had been the closest.

But where? Here, in the water? Or in the next town? Surely not farther than the next town. The hunch was that strong. That tremblingly strong. Like the verge of madness, and suddenly he knew that he
would
go mad if he did not find it soon. Maybe he was a little mad already.

Staring over moonlit water. And suddenly something disrupted its surface, flashed silently white in the moonlight and was gone again. Dooley stared at the spot. A fish? There had been no sound, no splash. A hand? The hand of a mermaid swum upstream from the North Sea beckoning him? Come in, the water’s fine. (But it wouldn’t be; it was
cold
.) Some supernatural water sprite? A displaced Rhine Maiden in the Weser?

But was it really a sign? Dooley, shivering now at the thought of what he was thinking, stood at the Weser’s edge and imagined how it would be…wading out slowly from the bank, letting his emotions create the tune for the clarinet, tilting his head back as the water became deeper so that the instrument would stick out of the water after he, Dooley, was under it, the bell of the clarinet last to submerge. And the sound, whatever sound there was, being made by the bubbling water closing over them. Over him first and then the clarinet. He recalled the clichéd allegation, which he had previously viewed with iconoclastic contempt but now felt almost ready to accept, that a drowning person was treated to a swift viewing of his entire life as it flashed before his eyes in a grand finale to living. What a mad montage that would be! What an inspiration for the final gurglings of the clarinet. What a frantic blending of the whole of his wild, sweetly sad, tortured existence, just as his straining lungs expelled their final gasp into a final note and inhaled the cold, dark water. A shudder of breathless anticipation coursed through Dooley Hanks’s body as his fingers trembled with the catch on the battered clarinet case.