Thunder and Roses (26 page)

“Leo—how can you
touch
it?”

“Makes nice touching. Didn’t you ever touch a mouse?”

She shuddered, looking at me as if I were Horatio just back from the bridge. “I can’t stand them.”

“Mice? Don’t tell me that you, of all people, really and truly have the traditional Victorian mouse phobia!”

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said weakly. “It isn’t only mice. It’s any little animal—frogs and lizards and even kittens and puppies. I like big dogs and cats and horses. But somehow—” She trembled again. “If I hear anything like little claws running across the floor, or see small things scuttling around the walls, it drives me crazy.”

I goggled. “If you hear—hey; it’s a good thing you didn’t stay another hour last night, then.”

“Last night?” Then, “Last night …” she said, in a totally different voice, with her eyes looking inward and happy. She chuckled. “I was telling—Arthur about that little phobia of mine last night.”

If I had thought my masterful handling of the mouse was going to do any good, apparently I was mistaken. “You better shove off,” I said bitterly. “Arthur might be waiting.”

“Yes,” she said, without any particular annoyance, “he might. Goodbye, Leo.”

“Goodbye.”

Nobody said anything for a time.

“Well,” she said, “goodbye.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll call you.”

“Do that,” she said, and went out.

I sat still on the couch for a long time, trying to get used to it. Wishful thinking was no good; I knew that. Something had happened between us. Mostly, its name was Arthur. The thing I couldn’t understand
was how he ever got a show, the way things were between Gloria and me. In all my life, in all my reading, I had never heard of such a complete fusion of individuals. We both felt it when we met; it had had no chance to get old. Arthur was up against some phenomenal competition; for one thing that was certain was that Gloria reciprocated my feelings perfectly, and one of my feelings was faith. I could understand—if I tried hard—how another man might overcome this hold, or that hold, which I had on her. There are smarter men than I, better-looking ones, stronger ones. Any of several of those items could go by the board, and leave us untouched.

But not faith! Not that! It was too big; nothing else we had was important enough to compensate for a loss of faith.

I got up to turn on the light, and slipped. The floor was wet. Not only was it wet; it was soft. I floundered to the seven-way lamp and cranked both switches all the way around.

The room was covered with tapioca. Ankle-deep on the floor, inches deep on the chairs and the couch.

“She’s thinking about it now,” said the head. Only it wasn’t a head this time. It was a flaccid mass of folded tissue. In it I could see pulsing blood vessels. My stomach squirmed.

“Sorry. I’m out of focus.” The disgusting thing—a sectioned brain, apparently—moved closer to me and became a face.

I lifted a foot out of the gummy mass, shook it, and put it back in again. “I’m glad she’s gone,” I said hoarsely.

“Are you afraid of the stuff?”

“No!” I said. “Of course not!”

“It will go away,” said the head. “Listen; I’m sorry to tell you; it isn’t syzygy. You’re done, son.”

“What isn’t syzygy?” I demanded. “And what is syzygy?”

“Arthur. The whole business with Arthur.”

“Go away,” I gritted. “Talk sense, or go away. Preferably—go away.”

The head shook from side to side, and its expression was gentle. “Give up,” it said. “Call it quits. Remember what was good, and fade out.”

“You’re no good to me,” ’ I muttered, and waded over to the book
case. I got out a dictionary, glowering at the head, which now was registering a mixture of pity and amusement

Abruptly, the tapioca disappeared.

I leafed through the book. Sizable, sizar, size, sizzle—“Try S-Y,” prompted the head.

I glared at it and went over to the S-Y’s. Systemize, systole—

“Here it is,” I said, triumphantly. “The last word in the S section.” I read from the book. “ ‘Syzygy—either of the points at which the moon is most nearly in line with the earth and the sun, as when it is new or full.’ What are you trying to tell me—that I’m caught in the middle of some astrological mumbo-jumbo?”

“Certainly not,” it snapped. “I will tell you, however, that if that’s all your dictionary says, it’s not a very good one.” It vanished.

“But—” I said vaguely. I went back to the dictionary. That’s all it had to say about syzygy. Shaking, I replaced it.

Something cat-sized and furry hurtled through the air, clawed at my shoulder. I startled, backed into my record cabinet and landed with a crash on the middle of my back in the doorway. The thing leaped from me to the couch and sat up, curling a long wide tail against its back and regarding me with its jewelled eyes. A squirrel.

“Well, hello!” I said, getting to my knees and then to my feet. “Where on earth did you come from?”

The squirrel, with the instantaneous motion of its kind, dived to the edge of the couch and froze with its four legs wide apart, head up, tail describing exactly its recent trajectory, and ready to take off instantly in any direction including up. I looked at it with some puzzlement. “I’ll go see if I have any walnuts,” I told it. I moved toward the archway, and as I did so the squirrel leaped at me. I threw up a hand to protect my face. The squirrel struck my shoulder again and leaped from it—

And as far as I know it leaped into the fourth dimension or somewhere. For I searched under and into every bed, chair, closet, cupboard, and shelf in the house, and could find no sign of anything that even looked like a squirrel. It was gone as completely as the masses of tapioca.…

Tapioca! What had the head said about the tapioca? “She’s thinking about it now.”
She
—Gloria, of course. This whole insane business was tied up with Gloria in some way.

Gloria not only disliked tapioca—she was afraid of it.

I chewed on that for a while, and then looked at the clock. Gloria had had time enough to get to the hotel. I ran to the phone, dialed.

“Hotel San Dragon,” said a chewing-gum voice.

“748, please,” I said urgently.

A couple of clicks. Then, “Hello?”

“Gloria,” I said. “Listen; I—”

“Oh, you. Listen—can you call me back later? I’m very busy.”

“I can and I will, but tell me something quickly: Are you afraid of squirrels?”

Don’t tell me a shudder can’t be transmitted over a telephone wire. One was that time, “I hate them. Call me back in about—”

“Why do you hate them?”

With exaggerated patience, she said carefully, “When I was a little girl, I was feeding some pigeons and a squirrel jumped right up on my shoulder and scared me half to death. Now,
please—
”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll speak to you later.” I hung up. She shouldn’t talk to me that way. She had no right—

What was she doing in that hotel room, anyway?

I pushed the ugly thought down out of sight, and went and poured myself a beer. Gloria is afraid of tapioca, I thought, and tapioca shows up here. She is afraid of the sound of small animals’ feet, and I hear them here. She is afraid of squirrels that jump on people, and I get a squirrel that jumps on people.

That must all make some sense. Of course, I could take the easy way out, and admit that I was crazy. But somehow, I was no longer so ready to admit anything like that. Down deep inside, I made an agreement with myself not to admit that until I had exhausted every other possibility.

A very foolish piece of business. See to it that you don’t do likewise. It’s probably much smarter not to try to figure things out.

There was only one person who could straighten this whole crazy
mess out—since the head wouldn’t—and that was Gloria, I thought suddenly. I realized, then, why I had not called all bets before now. I had been afraid to jeopardize the thing that Gloria and I shared. Well, let’s face it. We didn’t share it any longer. That admission helped.

I strode to the telephone, and dialed the hotel.

“Hotel San Dragon.”

“748, please.”

A moment’s silence. Then, “I’m sorry, sir. The party does not wish to be disturbed.”

I stood there looking blankly at the phone, while pain swirled and spiralled up inside me. I think that up to this moment I had treated the whole thing as part sickness, part dream; this, somehow, brought it to a sharp and agonizing focus. Nothing that she could have done could have been so calculated and so cruel.

I cradled the receiver and headed for the door. Before I could reach it, gray mists closed about me. For a moment I seemed to be on some sort of a treadmill; I was walking, but I could not reach anything. Swiftly, then, everything was normal.

“I must be in a pretty bad way,” I muttered. I shook my head. It was incredible. I felt all right, though a little dizzy. I went to the door and out.

The trip to the hotel was the worst kind of a nightmare. I could only conclude that there was something strange and serious wrong with me, completely aside from my fury and my hurt at Gloria. I kept running into these blind spells, when everything about me took on an unreal aspect. The light didn’t seem right. I passed people on the street who weren’t there when I turned to look at them. I heard voices where there were no people, and I saw people talking but couldn’t hear them. I overcame a powerful impulse to go back home. I couldn’t go back; I knew it; I knew I had to face whatever crazy thing was happening, and that Gloria had something to do with it.

I caught a cab at last, though I’ll swear one of them disappeared just as I was about to step into it. Must have been another of those
blind spells. After that it was easier. I slouched quivering in a corner of the seat with my eyes closed.

I paid off the driver at the hotel and stumbled in through the revolving doors. The hotel seemed much more solid than anything else since this horrible business had started to happen to me. I started over to the desk, determined to give some mad life-and-death message to the clerk to break that torturing “do not disturb” order. I glanced into the coffee room as I passed it and stopped dead.

She was in there, in a booth, with—with someone else. I couldn’t see anything of the man but a glossy black head of hair and a thick, ruddy neck. She was smiling at him, the smile that I thought had been born and raised for me.

I stalked over to them, trembling. As I reached them, he half-rose, leaned across the table, and kissed her.

“Arthur …” she breathed.

“That,” I said firmly, “will do.”

They did not move.

“Stop it!” I screamed. They did not move. Nothing moved, anywhere. It was a tableau, a picture, a hellish frozen thing put there to tear me apart.

“That’s all,” said a now-familiar voice, gently. “That kiss did it, son. You’re through.” It was the head, but now he was a whole man. An ordinary-looking, middle-sized creature he was, with a scrawny frame to match his unimpressive middle-aged face. He perched on the edge of the table, mercifully between me and that torturing kiss.

I ran to him, grasped his thin shoulders. “Tell me what it is,” I begged him. “Tell me, if you know—and I think you know. Tell me!” I roared, sinking my fingers into his flesh.

He put his hands up and laid them gently on my wrists, holding them there until I quieted down a little. I let him go. “I
am
sorry, son,” he said. “I hoped you would figure it all out by yourself.”

“I tried,” I said. I looked around me. The grayness was closing in again, and through it I could see the still figures of the people in the coffee shop, all stopped in mid-action. It was one three-dimensional frame of some unthinkable movie-film. I felt cold sweat all but squirt from the pores of my face. “Where am I?” I shrieked.

“Please,” he soothed. “Take it easy, and I’ll tell you. Come over here and sit down and relax. Close your eyes and don’t try to think. Just listen.”

I did as he asked, and gradually I stopped shaking. He waited until he felt that I was calm, and then began talking.

“There is a world of psychic things—call them living thought, call them dreams if you like. Now, you know that of all animals, only human beings can reach these psychic things. It was a biological accident. There is something about humans which is tangent to this psychic world. Humans have the power to open a gate between the two worlds. They can seldom control the power; often they’re not aware of it. But when that gate is opened, something materializes in the world of the humans. Imagination itself is enough to do it. If you are hungry, down deep inside, for a certain kind of woman, and if you picture her to yourself vividly enough, such a gate might open, and there she’ll be. You can see her and touch her; she’ll be little different from a real one.”

“But—there is a difference?”

“Yes, there is. She is not a separate thing from you. She is a part of you. She is your product. That’s what I was driving at when I mentioned parthenogenesis. It works like that.”

“Parthenogenesis—let’s see. That’s the process of reproducing without fertilization, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. This ‘materialization’ of yours is a perfect parallel to that. As I told you before, however, it is not a process with high survival value. For one thing, it affords no chance to cross strains. Unless a living creature can bring into itself other characteristics, it must die out.”

“Then why don’t all parthenogenetic creatures die out?”

“There is a process used by which the very simple, one-celled forms of life take care of that. Mind you,” he broke off suddenly, “I’m just using all of this biological talk as symbolism. There are basic laws that work in both worlds, that work equally on the high forms of life and the low. Do you see?”

“I see. These are just examples. But go on about this process that the parthenogenetic creatures use to mix their strains.”

“It’s very simple. Two of these organisms let their nuclei flow together for a time. Then they separate and go their ways again. It isn’t a reproductive process at all. It’s merely a way in which each may gain a part of the other. It’s called—syzygy.”

“Oh,” I said. “That. But I still don’t—let me see. You mentioned it first when that—that—”