Mother Aegypt and Other Stories Part 21

"OKAY. RIGHT. OKAY. RELATIVTTY CONDENSER? WHERE DO I FIND THAT? IT'S.

WHERE? WHERE DID YOU SAY? OH. OKAY." He listened a moment longer and then said, "ALL RIGHT, AND IT'S BEEN A PLEASURE TALKING TO YOU, SIR.".

He emerged from the booth, tucking the letter inside his nylon jacket. "I got to go to the market," he told her. "Thanks for your help."

"What did they say about the trap?"

"They think maybe I adjusted it wrong. It's set too small and that's why it's just catching bugs instead of that thing with the chicken feet. Said that's what's carrying the spores, like deer carry that Lyme Tick stuff? They gave me some suggestions, though." He winked at her. "Weil see what's cookin' now!"

He left with an air of importance. Ten minutes later she realized that he'd left the sphere in the phone booth. With some reluctance she retrieved it and walked over to the front window, examining the thing in the light.

Something inside, a vague outline of tiny wings. Yes, that was a moth in there, trapped in a cue ball of etched gla.s.s. What happened when you condensed Relativity? Was this a sphere of frozen Time? Could you turn Time into a solid so things got trapped in it? It had no unusual coldness now, no glow. She walked slowly back to the humidor cabinet and sat down, thoughtfully turning the sphere in her hands. A customer came in and paced up and down in front of the magazines, looking for something in particular.

Marybeth lifted a little square of plywood set into the floor, revealing the squared cavity in cement that had once held her father's safe. She dropped the sphere inside and covered it again.

"Can I help you find something?" she inquired, standing up.

She did not see Mr. Lynch for a week after that. One morning she had just arrived and was unlocking the door when a local customer approached, being tugged along by a Pomeranian in a hurry.

"'Morning, Marybeth!"

"Good morning, Mrs. Foster."

"Say if those movie people aren't done shooting in your store, do you think they might want to hire any extras? I used to work at RKO back before the war, you know."

She just stared, her hand motionless on the key. "Excuse me?"

"I tell you, it looked just like old times in there! All those beautiful old cars parked along the street outside, too. I saw a De Soto and a Packard just like Jerry used to have. Good-looking kid they had behind the counter-was that Jason Scott Lee?"

"Yes," she said, for no reason she understood.

"I thought so, but I didn't want to get too close. Will they be shooting again tonight?"

She shook her head. Mrs. Foster looked rueful. "Darn. I knew I should have gone home and gotten my autograph book. Well, she who hesitates is lost. Can I get in there and buy an air man stamp, honey?"

"Certainly Mrs. Foster." She woke from her trance and pushed the door open, and reversed the hanging sign to let the town know everything was business as usual. It clearly wasn't, but she didn't know what else to do.

After Mrs. Foster had gone, Marybeth did a quick check of the store. Nothing out of the ordinary; no copies of Look or The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post on the racks. A succession of octogenarians came in for crossword books, laxatives and cigars. A man in a dark suit and sungla.s.ses came in and bought a souvenir: a plastic snow-globe with sparkles instead of snow, swirling around a tiny plastic treasure chest full of clams.

Shortly before noon Mr. Lynch looked hesitantly around the door. His expression was most odd: scared and elated together. He was carrying a small suitcase.

"Why, Mr. Lynch, what's happened?" She stood up.

"Oh, just having my place exterminated," he said casually. "Got to take a hotel room for a couple of days, that's all." He set the suitcase inside the doorway and looked up and down the street before coming the rest of the way in. "You know that trap I sent off for? I got it to work, finally. Got the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, too. It didn't look like any animal to me-h.e.l.l, at first I thought it was a circus dwarf or something, but that nice boy from the Government said it was a Giant Rat of Sumatra. It's all froze solid inside one of them glow-b.a.l.l.s, only this is a real big one. Took a lot of my corn with it, but I about decided I wasn't going to eat that stuff anyway, not with whatever's wrong with it."

"You mean the-the whatever it is-the trap generated a big white sphere." Marybeth glanced involuntarily at the piece of plywood set in the floor.

"That's what I've been telling you !"

"And it caught something that looked to you like a little man."

"Yep. The boy explained about the trap generating a Temporary Field." Marybeth wondered if he meant Temporal. "Says it's just like that new equipment that freezes termites. See, those people from Pueblo, Colorado sent some men out here to see if the trap was working okay. They were right there at my trailer this morning, right after I got up. They're going to clean it all up for me, too, even all those bugs I got by mistake. I ask you now, is that thoughtful? And look at this." He lowered his voice and dug in his pants for his wallet. "Look here!" He pulled out and fanned three twenty-dollar bills. "That's to pay for my hotel room. Now, then. Do they know how to treat an old soldier or do they know how to treat an old soldier?"

The only thing she managed to say was, "I don't think you can get two nights for sixty dollars at this time of year, Mr. Lynch. Except maybe over at the Beachcomber."

"The Beachcomber will do me fine," he a.s.serted. "h.e.l.l, I don't need the frills. I need to buy a toothbrush and some toiletries from you, though. They said I couldn't use mine any more. Too many rodent genes from the extermination."

"You don't mean roentgens, do you?" She thought about the UFO articles she'd read.

"Yeah! That was it." He looked cheerful. "And I got to go get some underwear at the Thrift Shop, too."

"O-okay." She helped him find a new toothbrush, as well as a can of tooth powder and a tube of Burma-Shave, and rang up his purchases on the cash register. When he had limped out in triumph, she leaned down and lifted the piece of plywood. The sphere was exactly where she had put it, and it was not glowing. Another customer came in. She let the plywood drop back into place.

After she had locked up that night, she walked up Hinds Avenue as far as the corner of the old state highway, where she could get a good view- south to the edges of the dunes. She saw nothing out of the ordinary, and didn't know what she'd expected to see: a glowing white sphere the size of the Hollywood Cinerama Dome, maybe, with scores of hapless trailer park residents trapped in an eternal Now inside? As she walked back down in the direction of her parent's house, a baby blue 1958 Lincoln Continental zoomed up past her, radio playing loud. It sounded like it was playing "That'll Be The Day." Not the Linda Ronstadt version, though.

After dinner she opened the kitchen drawers and poked through them.

"Mom? Don't we have a pair of kitchen tongs?"

"They're in there somewhere." Her mother's voice drifted over the back of the sofa.

She found them at last, and took them to the front hall with a plastic grocery bag. Slipping on a sweater, she reached for her keys.

"Are you going out?" inquired her mother sleepily.

"Just down to the store. I think I left my book."

It was cold on the front porch, and the little figure in flowered pajamas was shivering as she looked up at the stars. She was waiting for one to fall out of the sky Marybeth remembered; and she almost stepped forward and advised herself to go inside, because the stars would never come within reach. She was not a cruel woman by nature, however, so she just stared fixedly at the child until she vanished, and then moved carefully past the place where she had been, down the steps into the street.

Kon-Tiki Liquors was still open as she crossed the street, but the red and yellow neon beer signs were being shut off one by one. The rest of the town was dark and silent. She experienced a peculiar disappointment as she came around the corner and found her parent's store as dark and silent as the rest.

Well, better safe than sorry She unlocked it, stepped inside and turned to lock the door behind her.

When she turned back, the counter was bathed in daylight, and her young father (G.o.d, he bad looked like Jason Scott Lee) was having a conversation with a stranger in a red Hawaiian shirt.

Man, oh, man, they must have been going a hundred miles an hour, the stranger was moaning. Her father was nodding in agreement. And they say he probably couldn't even see them in the dusk. Believe you me, that is one dangerous intersection even in broad daylight. He stubbed out a cigarette under the counter. She drew a deep breath and edged past them. Her father barely glanced at her. Honey, the new issues of Holliday Magazine came in.

"Okay. Thanks," she said, guessing that the ball of concentrated Time was doing more than warping the temporal flow around itself; Past and Present were becoming interactive. She leaned down to prize up the square of plywood. The sphere was glowing in there like a light bulb. She reached in with the kitchen tongs and pulled it out, and dropped it into the grocery bag. It flickered and went out, and when it did the daylight vanished and she was alone in the darkness of the store.

Out on Pomeroy Street again, she paused and wondered what to do next. After considering a number of possibilities, she walked over two blocks to the empty lot where the C-Air Motor Hotel had been before it burned down in 1966. A rusted standpipe protruded from a patch of cracked pink tiles there, nearly hidden by weeds. Using the tongs, she dropped the sphere into the pipe. She heard it rattling down into darkness. She dropped the tongs in after it and then wadded up the plastic bag and jammed that in too. Maybe the lead in the pipe would somehow shield against the temporal distortion. Or not; maybe it was an iron pipe. In any case, there was nothing she could do about it now. She walked home quickly and washed her hands as soon as she got in.

In the morning, she noticed that her watch was running backward. She replaced the battery when she got to the store, but it made no difference. Finally she turned it upside down and wore it that way.

The next time she saw Mr. Lynch, he looked crestfallen. He shuffled toward her down the aisle, clutching an envelope.

"You got any alarm clocks here?"

"Hi, Mr. Lynch. No, but Bob's Hardware has them. Did those people finish fumigating your trailer?"

she inquired.

"What? Oh. Oh, yeah. It was too bad, though-I lost the whole garden." He blinked. Was he on the point of tears?

"Well, you probably wouldn't have wanted to eat anything from that crop anyway, you said so yourself," she reminded him.

"Yeah, but all my topsoil's gone too. There's a big round hole now, must be eight feet deep. The boy from the Government said it was Geologic Subsidence. Said it didn't have anything to do with the other problem. Gave me some good advice, though." He nodded somberly and waved the envelope. "I can get free clean fill dirt. AU I got to do is write to this Post Office Box in Pueblo, Colorado."

As the summer wore on, there were occasional reports of odd occurrences-somebody thought they saw a ghost in the Elks Lodge, and the instances of red tides causing phosph.o.r.escence in the surf increased. There were more surfers with old-style longboards in the water, and more little boys with crewcuts playing on the beach-but Retro was In these days, wasn't it?

And the occasional sightings of cla.s.sic cars, gleaming as if lovingly restored, caused nothing but sentimental pleasure for the witnesses.

She was still a little uneasy about what she'd done with the sphere, but its effect seemed weak and dissipated. No phantom C-Air Motor Hotel rose from the weeds and at least Hatta's News, Cigars and Sundries was no longer the center of the phenomena.

And, really how could it hurt business? Don't people come to little seaside towns to stop Time, to pretend they'll never grow old or haven't grown old, to relive a summer afternoon forgotten thirty years?

Marybeth went on working in the store, going home to fix dinner for her parents each night. She put a radio behind the counter, tuned to an oldies station, and hummed along as she waited on customers or arranged new stock on the shelves. The older customers complained bitterly about the G.o.d-d.a.m.ned Rock and Roll, and she'd apologize at once and turn the volume down until they left the store. Sometimes the news broadcasts mentioned the wrong President, but not often enough to draw attention. Secure, with a watch resolutely running backward, Marybeth Hatta was really rather happy. The past was pleasant at least. You have to live somewhere, after all.

Mother Aegypt Leaving His Cares Behind.

"Speak sweetly to the Devil, until you're both over the bridge."

Transylvanian proverb.

In a country of mad forests and night, there was an open plain, and pitiless sunlight.

A man dressed as a clown was running for his life across the plain.

A baked-clay track, the only road for miles, reflected the sun's heat and made the man sweat as he ran along it. He was staggering a little as he ran, for he had been running a long while and he was fat, and the silken drawers of his clown costume had begun to work their way down his thighs. It was a particularly humiliating costume, too. It made him look like a gigantic dairymaid.

His tears, of terror and despair, ran down with his sweat and streaked the clown-white, graying his big mustache; the lurid crimson circles on his cheeks had already run, trickling pink down his neck. His straw-stuffed bosom had begun to slip, too, working its way down his dirndl, and now it dropped from beneath his petticoat like a stillbirth. Gasping, he halted to s.n.a.t.c.h it up, and peered fearfully over his shoulder.

No sign of his pursuers vet; but they were mounted and must catch up with him soon, on this long straight empty plain. There was no cover anywhere, not so much as a single tree. He ran on, stuffing his bosom back in place, whimpering. Gnats whined in his ears.

Then, coming over a gentle swell of earth, he beheld a crossroads. There was his salvation!

A team of slow horses drew two wagons, like the vardas of the Romanies but higher, and narrower, nor were they gaily painted in any way They were black as the robe of scythe-bearing Death. Only: low, small and ominous, in white paint in curious antiquated letters, they bore the words: MOTHER AEGYPT.

The man wouldn't have cared if Death himself held the reins. He aimed himself at the hindmost wagon, drawing on all his remaining strength, and 755 pelted on until he caught up with it.

For a moment he ran desperate alongside, until he was able to gain the front and haul himself up, over the hitch that joined the two wagons. A moment he poised there, ponderous, watching drops of his sweat fall on hot iron. Then he crawled up to the door of the rear wagon, unbolted it, and fell inside.

The driver of the wagons, hooded under that glaring sky, was absorbed in a waking dream of a place lost for millennia. Therefore she did not notice that she had taken on a pa.s.senger.

The man lav flat on his back, puffing and blowing, too exhausted to take much note of his surroundings. At last he levered himself up on his elbows, looking about. After a moment he scooted into a sitting position and pulled off the ridiculous lace milkmaid's cap, with its braids of yellow yarn. Wiping his face with it, he muttered a curse.

In a perfect world, he reflected, there would have been a chest of clothing in this wagon, through which he might rummage to steal some less conspicuous apparel. There would, at least, have been a pantry with food and drink. But the fates had denied him yet again; this was n.o.body's cozy living quarters on wheels. This wagon was clearly used for storage, holding nothing but boxes and bulky objects wrapped in sacking.

Disgusted, the man dug in the front of his dress and pulled out his bosom. He shook it by his ear and smiled as he heard the clink-clink. The gold rings were still there, some of the loot with which he'd been able to escape.

The heat within the closed black box was stifling, so he took off all his costume but for the silken drawers. Methodically he began to search through the wagon, opening the boxes and unwrapping the parcels. He chuckled.

He knew stolen goods when he saw them.

Some of it had clearly been lifted from Turkish merchants and bureaucrats: rolled and tied carpets, tea services edged in gold. But there were painted ikons here too, and family portraits of Russians on wooden panels. Austrian crystal bowls. Chased silver ewers and platters. Painted urns. A whole umbrella-stand of cavalry sabers, some with ornate decoration, some plain and ancient, evident heirlooms. Nothing was small enough to slip into a pocket, even if he had had one, and nothing convenient to convert into ready cash.

Muttering, he lifted out a saber and drew it from its scabbard.

As he did so, he heard the sound of galloping hooves. The saber dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers. He flattened himself against the door, pointlessly, as the hoofbeats drew near and pa.s.sed. He heard the shouted questions. He almost-not quite-heard the reply, in a woman's voice pitched very low. His eyes rolled, searching the room for any possible hiding place. None at all; unless he were to wrap his bulk in a carpet, like Cleopatra.

Yet the riders pa.s.sed on, galloped ahead and away. When he realized that he was, for the moment, safe, he collapsed into a sitting position on the floor.

After a moment of listening to his heart thunder, he picked up the saber again.

It was night before the wagon halted at last, rumbling over rough ground as it left the road. He was still crouched within, cold and cramped now. Evidently the horses were unhitched, and led down to drink at a stream; he could hear splashing. Dry sacks were broken, a fire was lit. He thought of warmth and food. A light footfall approached, followed by the sound of someone climbing up on the hitch. The man tensed.

The door opened.

There, silhouetted against the light of the moon, was a small pale spindly- looking person with a large head. A wizened child? It peered into the wagon, uncertainty in its big rabbitlike eyes. There was a roll of something-another carpet?-under its arm.

"Hah!" The man lunged, caught the other by the wrist, hauling him in across the wagon's threshold.

Promptly the other began to scream, and he screamed like a rabbit too, shrill and unhuman. He did not struggle, though; in fact, the man had the unsettling feeling he'd grabbed a ventriloquist's dummy, limp and insubstantial within its mildewed clothes.

"Shut your mouth!" the man said, in the most terrifying voice he could muster. "I want two things!"

But his captive appeared to have fainted. As the man registered this, he also became aware that a woman was standing outside the wagon, seeming to have materialized from nowhere, and she was staring at him.

"Don't kill him," she said, in a flat quiet voice.

"Uh-I want two things!" the man repeated, holding the saber to his captive's throat. "Or TU kill him, you understand?"

"Yes," said the woman. "What do you want?"

The man blinked, licked his lips. Something about the woman's matter- of-fact voice disturbed him.

"I want food, and a suit of clothes!"

The woman's gaze did not shift. She was tall, and dark as a shadow, even standing in the full light of the moon, and simply dressed in black.