Again, Dangerous Visions Part 65

Maracot brought to the session not only his scepticism, but a veritable brute of a man, bulging with old hockey muscles, whom he had recruited during one of his trips in disguise to the docks along the banks of the Monongohela (which in those days, as the name indicates, was much haunted by Mongols). This creature was made as welcome to the seance by Deepily and the Pullovers as was everyone else, and Maracot was then invited to search both Mrs. Pullover and her cabinet. Insofar as I could see, he did both with equal impartiality, including all the drawers of both.

Then we all sat down, the lights were turned to a ghostly dimness, and Mrs. Pullover called upon her "contact," a childish spirit named Sam.

"Me wee pee lamb top hole allee samee sensa wonda byembye seeka tomollah, you bet," piped the little voice.

"Tell me, Sam, dear, is there anyone in the land of mist who wishes to speak to anyone here?" Mrs. Pullover intoned.

"Here ee weary topside bigfella past competent journalist Bergen Record," Sam squeaked through the trumpet. "Callself allsame J. R. Transistor, wantee mohtal gaslight explohah infinite storm."

But no, no one would own to a friend named J. R. Transistor, or even a relative of that name. But at the same moment there emerged from the cabinet an astonishing vision, wrapped from moorc.o.c.k to gernsback in a coating of ectoplasm.

"Grab him!" cried the voice of my friend, and the soccer player lunged in a full football tackle for the anxious ankles of the spirit. Since he failed to release my hand as he did so, we soon found ourselves rather more entangled with each other than with the Problem of the White Sheet, but in the confusion managed to make the best resolution of it that presented itself.

It was sometime later that I asked my friend how he had known that Mrs. Pullover had been generating the voices in the tube by vibrating her diaphragm. "My dear Felicity," he said, stuffing his Persian slipper into a pot, "can you really have missed the clue of the Third Fundamentalism? Then I fear that you are too inattentive to serve any longer as my liaison officer."

And with this, alas, I was waved away anew, and never again saw the best and wisest and most unsatisfactory man that I have ever known.

LETTER THE FIFTH.

All apelike young Irishmen named George, as is well known, eat nothing less good than tournedos Rossini. Thus it was no surprise to me to find that he was a mushroom cultivator. He was the turnkey's second oldest brother, and despite his ugliness I believe he had the heart of a poet. I found him very engaging, though somewhat gullible.

I cannot say the same for his wife, who struck me as the most stupid, blind, perverse, and ill-natured witch who ever infested the earth. I do not know why such men always marry such women, unless it is because they think they can get no other kind.

I disabused him of this notion, if he had it, rather quickly. Finding me friendly, he took me to the cellar to show me his beds of rare mushrooms, and behind the boiler I raised another specimen which afterwards we cultivated a.s.siduously in my own bed. If he was taken aback to find me more expert at fungiculture than he, he was too gentlemanly to say so. For my part, I found that like all true amateurs, what he lacked in technical polish he more than made up for in energy.

Since we now shared one secret which had to be kept from his demon of a wife, he showed me another one: a species of morel which, when dried, broken up and chewed, released a remarkable drug. I found that it tasted like a mouthful of elastic bands, but after only a few moments made one feel like a bird of paradise that had just been released from a cage.

In particular, if taken just before bedtime, the dried morel heightened the pleasures of entertaining a friend to the shimmering verge of delirium. I said as much; and George then confessed that for years it had been the only thing that had made his wife's company at all tolerable to him.

This remark set me to thinking with some speed. George was charming, his house was cozy, he had money and an unusual hobby to keep him occupied while either of us was temporarily bored or otherwise out of touch with the other; the only serpent in this Eden was the legal female demon. One night after he had been stifling a particularly deep resentment of her, I asked him casually if some of his pets were poisonous.

This leaven-these mycelial metaphors are getting away from me-produced a fine brew in a remarkably short time. George's proposal was for tournedos Rossini with broiled mushrooms, at which the demon should receive the deadly Amanitopsis v.a.g.i.n.ata Amanitopsis v.a.g.i.n.ata, and George and I the morel as a prelude to a night of celebration. As for the police, George said, shrugging, doubtless they would be sticky for a while, but a mistake is a mistake: Everyone knows that amateurs should not cook with noncommercial mushrooms.

And so they shouldn't. As the meal progressed, the demon and I were seized with a progressive fit of the giggles, while George slowly turned an unbecoming black.

LETTER THE SIXTH.

It was hushed and silent spring by the time I had beaten my way, through the inhuman malice of the jungle and the savagery of the natives, to the fabled lost valley of Hidden, Del. For a part of the expedition I had been accompanied by three gallant soldiers of fortune, veterans of the Boxer Rebellion, whom I had recruited under a boxcar, but alas, the last of these had perished after 72 pages in small type of terrible privations. Now only I stood looking down into the valley upon the stately mansion in which, if the turnkey's frightened whispers could be trusted, there dwelt that creature of legend and dream, my aunt Messalina.

I say it was silent; but the hush was the absence only of the usual rustling of pine fronds, the blood-curdling distant roar of squirrels, the indignant chattering of deer, even the trilling of robins. Instead, the air seemed filled, as if with exotic perfume, with a far-off bungling, as of the blowing of faery flutes. What sort of creature could make so magical a sound? (Later, I was privileged to see an entire flock of them: scaly and winged, in some parts of the valley they dangled from every participle.) As I mounted the steps of the mansion, this elfin music was joined by the sound of gongs, hollow, awful, empty, one to each step. What did this gongorism portend? But I was given no time to ponder the puzzle, for the great door swung open, and before me in the aperture stood-the White G.o.ddess, my aunt Messalina herself!

How to describe such beauty? Her eyes were blue, wondrous, though not without a taint of fiendishness in them; an almost invisible veil slipped down from the neck, the shoulders, half-revealing, hoo boy, the gleaming b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And eldritch, eldritch beyond all song was that exquisite head and bust floating above me-and beautiful, dextrously beautiful beyond all singing, too. So might even Potiphar's wife, that ever-normal granary of fruitfulness, have shown herself tempting Joseph!

"Ah, Felici-tee!" she cried in a mocking voice. "My winged messengers have foretold your coming! Enter my temple, and be glad!"

Within, the mansion revealed itself to be indeed a temple, but a temple of sensuousness, a palace of indulgence. I paused, awe-struck, and behind me sounded Messalina's tinkling laughter. Before me on divans, languidly sipping some nectar from golden goblets, lay a motley company, consisting at the moment of three men and a girl (though I found later that there were many others among the worshipers of the G.o.ddess). The men present were a fey Irish-American, a huge Scandinavian who in his speech constantly invoked a mixture of Norse and German G.o.ds, and a dirty spy (whether German or Russian I was never able to determine). The innocent-appearing girl was named, appropriately enough, Magda.

At the back of the great chamber was the G.o.ddess' throne, and above the dais on which it rested there hung on the wall, suspended from two golden thumbtacks, a Satanic mask which constantly wept, drooled and sweated typewriter-ribbon ink. This ran down into a golden bowl, which was periodically borne away and replaced, by squattering, froglike creatures.

One of these brought me a beaker of the lambent ichor, which I drank gratefully; as I raised it to my lips, there was a clamor of flutings from the invisible creatures, as though in warning, but I was too hot and sticky from the jungle to heed it, and quaffed deeply. At once my senses reeled, and I can give no coherent account of what followed, except that it somehow involved Magda, myself and the G.o.ddess with the three men in a sort of drugged garland, and that toward its end I was a good deal stickier than before but not quite so hot.

How long this might have gone on is impossible to guess, for as we were drowsily rearranging ourselves upon the floor and divans, there entered a call, burly man in the robes of a pagan priest, whose harsh countenance was almost a duplicate of that of the drooling mask.

"Ha, Messalina!" he thundered. "Once again I find you in the toils of self-indulgence, to the neglect of all those intrigues which imperil your kingdom! Fie, witch-woman, and for shame!"

"Be not so harsh, O Abram," the White G.o.ddess whispered in her cadent voice. "Call me instead by those sweet names you called me of old-Queen of Spayeds, Egg of the Wild Pigeons-s-s-s-"

But he interrupted her brutally, drawing his singing sword. "Enough!" he tromboned. "You have betrayed your ministry! You must pay!"

Since all the rest of this company seemed too drugged with the elixir to act, I arose and walked toward him, removing my tattered marching clothes (an easy task, for by then I was wearing only the shirt, and that open) in preparation for combat. The evil priest's eyes widened as he realized that he still had a capable antagonist.

"Felici-tee!" my aunt trilled. "Do not oppose him! It is sacrilege!"

But I did not heed her; to do so would have been the death of us all. I stared boldly into the eyes of the villain.

"Do you dare," I said, "risk single combat with one not of your world, who sneers at your base superst.i.tions?"

His eyes narrowed calculatingly, but he did not hesitate; he had courage, this evil priest, I must allow him that. We closed in furious engagement. For a while, I thought I had met my master, for he was fresh, and I both tired and wine-benumbed; but at last he lay exhausted beneath me.

Pulling his weapon from my flesh-no difficult task, now-I arose; but my triumph was short-lived. The squattering creatures were back in the room, hordes of them, in panic flight.

"Deadloin!" they croaked in terrified batrachian voices. "The deadloin is coming!"

Turning in bewilderment, I beheld again the mask on the wall. Its expression was now truly malignant, and from it was coming such torrents of ink that paper to carry it would have deforested all of Canada. The black tide rolled across the tesselated floor toward us. There was nothing to do but flee-but my erstwhile companions had neither will nor strength left to do so. As I paused at the door, I saw it overwhelm them.

My last memory of that enchanted realm is of the despairing music of the invisible creatures. I shall carry it in my heart well into the next 253 pages.

LETTER THE SEVENTH.

In order to protect himself and his researches from the fear and malice of the ignorant, and the prying of journalists, my third uncle had changed his name to Philip H. Ess.e.x and removed his laboratory to a remote island off the Jersey coast. There is no traffic with the island from the mainland, and to reach it I had to take a small launch sent for me by the doctor.

The Charon of this ferry was a sinister and taciturn creature of great strength-though I discovered when we disembarked that he limped-and s.h.a.gginess, rather resembling a Lord Byron who had somehow tried to turn himself into an ape. He was so surly that I wondered why my uncle tolerated him, although he did certainly seem able to keep his own counsel, and his att.i.tude toward the doctor was outright servile.

This question, however, vanished from my mind when I saw Dr. Ess.e.x's residence, which looked not so much like a laboratory as a stockade. Once he had made me comfortable in his study, however, he explained this very readily.

"There are wild beasts on this island," he said. "Yes, wild. Lots of them. Wouldn't do to venture outside. Wouldn't do at all."

He fell to ruminating. I prompted him.

"How did it happen? Oh, well...easily enough. These are dangerous waters, around the island. Rocks. Shoals. Some years ago, a supply ship for a zoo, bound for Florida, got caught in a storm and was beached. None of the crew survived, but many of the animals got ash.o.r.e.

"And bred. Oh, yes, they breed.

"Incredible, eh? But come along and I'll show you."

He arose and led me to his surgery, a huge place, almost like a dynamo shed. Here, in a cage against one wall, was a tawny young lioness, pacing and pacing.

"Rather a windfall for me," my uncle said. "Experimental animals, free of charge. And extraordinary ones. None of your commonplace white rats or guinea-pigs for me."

The lioness glared at him as though she had half-understood the import of his remark in some dim, savage corner of her mind. I felt quite sorry for her, though indeed she seemed quite as dangerous as he had suggested.

The suggestion preyed upon me later that night, nor was sleep sped by what seemed to be a remote throbbing of drums. Were there other people on this island as well, besides my uncle, his sinister boatman and myself? He had not said so; nor could I imagine how there could come to be drum-thumping savages this close to a great center of civilization like Long Branch, N. J. Perhaps it was only some trick of the waves.

Then I became aware of a truly terrifying animal sound, a sort of m.u.f.fled screaming-yet unlike the cry of an animal too, in that it seemed to come with almost mechanical regularity. It was all the more frightening in that its source seemed to be somewhere inside the stockade-perhaps inside the house itself!

Putting on a wrapper, I opened my bedroom door. Yes, the sound was indeed inside the house, and it was not hard to track down; it was coming from my uncle's surgery, under the door of which an eerie greenish light streamed. I knelt and peered through the keyhole, and beheld an astonishing sight.

The lioness had been removed from her cage and was now pinioned to the far wall of the shed, as if crucified. In this position she looked rather like some misshapen human creature in golden furs. My uncle, his face impa.s.sive and yet somehow Satanic in the green light, was systematically and intimately tickling her with a long white feather.

As I watched, paralyzed, the mechanical screaming began gradually to take on a human quality, like the voice of a woman, and to be interspersed with panting, gasps and groans. When at last the poor tormented creature also began to giggle, I could bear it no more, and fled.

It took me most of the next day to nerve myself up to asking my uncle the meaning of this scene, and when I did, his face darkened menacingly.

"Still I suppose you can do no harm," he said after a moment. "And the work I am prosecuting here is the culmination of the work of thousands of men-this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous experimental and intellectual effort is needed-mine-to finish the great work.

"Very few laymen can possibly understand the power that the nervous system has over the very shape of the total living organism. Here and there you will find a few people who say glibly that their illness of the moment may be psychosomatic, by which they mean no more than that their footling emotions have made them sick...which happens more often than either they or that charlatan Freud ever dreamed. But very few indeed realize that the energy which drives the nervous system itself, which I have called orgroan energy, could under proper control reorganize their whole physical being.

"But the control must be very precise. Specifically, the stimuli involved must be applied delicately to those organs of the mature corpus which are most richly supplied with nerve-ends.

"These are, of course, the sense-organs, as any first-form student of anatomy knows. But while most of the senses are localized in the tongue, the ear and so on, there are no specific organs of touch. This is why all my predecessors missed the essential clue, which in fact must be found in moral philosophy, not in science. Almost every philosopher has spoken-at one time or another-of the human rites of mating as a form of animalism, or, at the very least, a kind of animality. Very well. Suppose we should turn the equation upside down? The key for turning an animal into a man must lie through the sense of touch in what is called the erogenous zones.

"And in fact I have succeeded-or almost succeeded-in transforming animals into men by this route. A complete transformation still eludes me, but all my results show that I am on the right track...It is perhaps unfortunate that the sensory areas involved are also the ones most richly supplied with pain axons, but one can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."

"But," I said, "aren't there laws against...vivisection?"

"Pah! I'm not cutting animals up. Quite the contrary. I'm giving them the chance to use their own misdirected nervous energy to make themselves into something finer than their Creator did...their Creator, and all the forces of evolution.

"Of course..." he paused, and put the tips of his fingers together. "Of course, they don't see it in quite that light. Not yet. They don't understand. They fear me. Indeed I think many of them hate me; that is why I must have the stockade. But they'll come around.

"You've met my boatman. He's He's come around. He was a baboon to begin with; closer to the human than the bears and tigers and so on that I've worked with since. And the breeding is a problem. You see, my work doesn't affect the genes, so the cubs of these creatures revert to type. But there again, that's only a hurdle, not an impa.s.sable wall. I shall conquer it. I come around. He was a baboon to begin with; closer to the human than the bears and tigers and so on that I've worked with since. And the breeding is a problem. You see, my work doesn't affect the genes, so the cubs of these creatures revert to type. But there again, that's only a hurdle, not an impa.s.sable wall. I shall conquer it. I shall shall conquer it!" conquer it!"

"Perhaps you will," I said. "In fact I can hardly doubt it. But if you don't mind, I'd prefer not to see it happen. I shall be going back to the mainland in the morning."

"No," he said. "No, I'm afraid I can't let you do that. I already have good reason to mistrust your discretion...and people might misunderstand, and come to interfere. You'll have to remain here. But there's nothing to fear, as long as you stay inside the stockade. I can't guarantee your safety otherwise."

The threat was clear, but after what I had seen, and the revelation of the true nature of the ferryman-who was was inside the stockade-I resolved not to stay in that House of Orgroan another moment longer than I could possibly help. And indeed, I stole out of it late that night-while my uncle was occupied in his horrible theatre of green light-and, as I thought, forever. inside the stockade-I resolved not to stay in that House of Orgroan another moment longer than I could possibly help. And indeed, I stole out of it late that night-while my uncle was occupied in his horrible theatre of green light-and, as I thought, forever.

The jungle was very dark but the beating of the drums guided me to the rude village which had been built by Dr. Ess.e.x's creatures. After a few ticklish moments of suspicion, I was welcomed. The males among them were sufficiently human to be conscious of the fact that they had never seen a white, hairless woman before, and to be consumed with the hope of fathering cubs more human-rather than less, as was, as my uncle had told me, the rule-than their parents; and yet they were also sufficiently animal to make their attempts at such parenthood remarkably more emphatic than any I had ever encountered before.

It was several days before I was able to get them off this subject for more than a few hours at a time, nor did I make any real attempt to change it until I felt that it had been completely exhausted, and perhaps even become somewhat of a sore one. But then I soon found other ways in which their longing to be human expressed itself.

Obviously, once cast out of the stockade as unsuccessful experiments, they had to adapt to the new conditions in which they found themselves, and gradually managed to do so, though of course with many failures. These methods and expedients they called the New Ways. But there was among them a very vocal group which still longed for the Old Ways of life within the enclosure, and this expressed itself in a pathetic attempt to talk like P. H. Ess.e.x, Ph.D. Strange it was to hear, issuing from these furry faces, this gabble of "thought-variants," "sixth-order forces," "inertialess drives," "second foundations," "rational n.o.bility" and other such terms which had no bearing at all upon the kind of life they were now leading.

This might have been merely pitiable or merely comic, or a mixture of both, depending upon one's temperament, had I not discovered that this longing for the Old Ways was no longer limited to mere talk. A substantial number of the creatures were planning a return to the enclosure, by force if necessary. The consequences of this course could well be serious for all concerned, for brutish though they were, these creations of Dr. Ess.e.x had fire.

In the dead of the night before the storm broke, therefore, I persuaded (or rather bribed) one of the youngest of them to help me steal the boat, and with a sigh of relief found myself on the way back to the mainland. Even today, however, when I hear the piercing voices of the yahoos in the streets, I sometimes shudder and long for the rational n.o.bility of the horse, though I can't figure out how he gets into the story at all.

LETTER THE EIGHTH.

"Why, bless my pushb.u.t.tons!" my fourth uncle chuckled chinnily. "If it isn't my niece, Felicity!"

The young inventor looked up from his giant hydraulic microscope as I entered, a trace of a twinkle in his serious blue eyes. Under the microscope, he had been puzzledly studying his own thumb, but now, rising, he thrust it into his mouth and made me welcome.

"Tell me, Uncle Tom (for that was his name)," I responded antiphonally, "why were you studying your thumb?"

He looked carefully under his workbench, behind the doors, out the window and up the flue before replying.

"I am surrounded by scientific crooks and international spies," he gritted flintily. "I must take the utmost precautions against theft."

I could well understand this. Arranged around the eighteen-year-old genius' workbench were cabinets containing models of some of his previous marvelous inventions: the clockwork nightingale, the rocket calliope, the Steam Drive, the Earth-Moon ladder, the psionic stamplicker, the British telephone system and the marine dowser. Most of these had been cast in bronze, but even those made of Tomasite, the young inventor's wonder plastic, were scratched, dented and chipped from having been stolen at least once per book since about 1897.

At last, however, he seemed satisfied, and resumed his seat. "Now, here's my plan," he declared. "I find that the chases, adventures and mysteries in which I am constantly becoming involved leave me very little time for research. Also, they are constantly disrupting the work and the income of the Enterprises Construction Company, and sometimes the whole town of Workville-"

Abruptly he was interrupted as a stout, stubble-faced man burst into the laboratory. "Brand my lil ole circus sideshow, Tom," he sighed complainingly, "but yore mother an' sister will be plumb ornery with me if you don't make it home for grub agin tonight!"

Tom grinned. "Okay," he said, and when the chubby man went out, he added, "That was Chow Ping Plonker, the former chuck-wagon cook who tends galley in the laboratory. If I do not eat at home, I have to eat his cooking, and I get rather tired of mashed mongoose fritters. But that is part of the problem. We all need time to eat and sleep, too."

"Whew!" I exclaimed bewilderedly. "But how do you propose to deal with the problem, Uncle Tom? It seems insoluble."

"By a division of labor," he replied. "Hereafter I will leave all the inventing to my father. After all, it was he who made all the basic discoveries of our age, no matter what the history books say-the dirigible, the great searchlight, the war tank, the motorcycle and many more. I shall devote myself entirely to chasing our enemies."

"But that will not leave you very much more time for eating and sleeping," I objected.

"I will need less," he confided confidently. "I shall convert myself into a terrible hunting machine."

"A robot?" I cried gloomily. "That seems inhuman!"

"No, indeed," he replied cheerfully. "For my brain, my senses and all my important organs will remain untouched. They will only be reinforced mechanically. I shall become not a robot, but a cyborg!"