Martian Time-Slip

  “Can we shake hands, Arnie?” Jack asked.

  “Sure, Jack.” Arnie stuck out his hand and the two of them shook, hard and long, looking each other in the eye. “I expect to see a lot of you, Jack. This isn't the end between you and me; it's just the beginning.” He let go of Jack Bohlen's hand, walked back into the kitchen, and stood by himself, thinking.

  Presently Doreen joined him. “That was dreadful news for you, wasn't it?” she said, putting her arm around him.

  “Very bad,” Arnie said. “Worst I had in a long time. But I'll be O.K.; I'm not scared of the co-op movement. Lewistown and the Water Workers were here first, and they'll be here a lot longer. If I had gotten this project with the Steiner boy started sooner, it would have worked out differently, and I sure don't blame Jack for that.” But inside him, in his heart, he thought, You were working against me, Jack. All the time. You were working with your father. From the start, too; from the day I hired you.

  He returned to the living room. At the tape transport, Jack stood morose and silent, fooling with the knobs.

  “Don't take it hard,” Arnie said to him.

  “Thanks, Arnie,” Jack said. His eyes were dull. “I feel I've let you down.”

  “Not me,” Arnie assured him. “You haven't let me down, Jack. Because nobody lets me down.”

  On the floor, Manfred Steiner pasted away, ignoring them all.

  As he flew his father back to the house, leaving the F.D.R. range behind them, Jack thought, Should I show the boy's picture to Arnie? Should I take it to Lewistown and hand it over to him? It's so little…it just doesn't look like what I ought to have produced, by now.

  He knew that tonight he would have to see Arnie, in any case.

  “Very desolate down there,” his dad said, nodding toward the desert below. “Amazing you people have done so much reclamation work; you should all be proud.” But his attention was actually on his maps. He spoke in a perfunctory manner; it was a formality.

  Jack snapped on his radio transmitter and called Arnie, at Lewistown. “Excuse me, dad; I have to talk to my boss.”

  The radio made a series of noises, which attracted Manfred momentarily; he ceased poring over his drawing and raised his head.

  “I'll take you along,” Jack said to the boy.

  Presently he had Arnie. “Hi, Jack.” Arnie's voice came boomingly. “I been trying to get hold of you. Can you—”

  “I'll be over to see you tonight,” Jack said.

  “Not before? How about this afternoon?”

  “Afraid tonight is as soon as I can make it,” Jack said. “There—” He hesitated. “Nothing to show you until tonight If I get near him, he thought, I'll tell him about the UN-co-op project; he'll get everything out of me. I'll wait until after my dad's claim has been filed, and then it won't matter.

  “Tonight, then,” Arnie agreed. “And I'll be on pins, Jack. Sitting on pins. I know you're going to come up with something; I got a lot of confidence in you.”

  Jack thanked him, said goodbye, and rang off.

  “Your boss sounds like a gentleman,” his dad said, after the connection had been broken. “And he certainly looks up to you. I expect you're of priceless value to his organization, a man with your ability.”

  Jack said nothing. Already he felt guilty.

  “Draw me a picture,” he said to Manfred, “of how it's going to go tonight, between me and Mr. Kott.” He took away the paper on which the boy was drawing and handed him a blank piece. “Will you Manfred? You can see ahead to tonight. You, me, Mr. Kott, at Mr. Kott's place.”

  The boy took a blue crayon and began to draw. As he piloted the ’copter, Jack watched.

  With great care, Manfred drew. At first Jack could not make it out. Then he grasped what the scene showed. Two men. One was hitting the other in the eye.

  Manfred laughed, a long, high-pitched, nervous laugh, and suddenly hugged the picture against himself.

  Feeling cold, Jack turned his attention back to the controls before him. He felt himself perspire, the damp sweat of anxiety. Is that how it's going to be? he asked, silently, within himself. A fight between me and Arnie? And you will witness it, perhaps…or at least know of it, one day.

  “Jack,” Leo was saying, “you'll take me to the abstract company, won't you? And let me off there? I want to get my papers filed. Can we go right there, instead of back to the house? I have to admit I'm uneasy. There must be local operators who're watching all this, and I can't be too careful.”

  Jack said, “I can only repeat: it's immoral, what you're doing.”

  “Just let me handle it,” his father said. “It's my way of doing business, Jack. I don't intend to change.”

  “Profiteering,” Jack said.

  “I won't argue it with you,” his father said. “It's none of your concern. If you don't feel like assisting me, after I've come millions of miles from Earth, I guess I can manage to round up public transportation.” His tone was mild, but he had turned red.

  “I'll take you there,” Jack said.

  “I can't stand to be moralized at,” his father said.

  Jack said nothing. He turned the ’copter south, toward the UN buildings at Pax Grove.

  Drawing away with his blue crayon, Manfred made one of the two men in his picture, the one who had been hit in the eye, fall down and become dead. Jack saw that, saw the figure become supine and then still. Is that me? he wondered. Or is it Arnie?

  Someday—perhaps soon—I will know.

  Inside Mr. Kott's skin were dead bones, shiny and wet. Mr. Kott was a sack of bones, dirty and yet shiny-wet. His head was a skull that took in greens and bit them; inside him the greens became rotten things as something ate them to make them dead.

  Jack Bohlen, too, was a dead sack, teeming with gubbish. The outside that fooled almost everyone, it was painted pretty and smelled good, bent down over Miss Anderton, and he saw that; he saw it wanting her in an awful fashion. It poured its wet, sticky self nearer to her and the dead bug words popped from its mouth.

  “I love Mozart,” Mr. Kott was saying. “I'll put this tape on.” He fiddled with the knobs of the amplifier. “Bruno Walter conducting. A great rarity from the golden age of recordings.”

  A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. He shut off the tape transport.

  “Sorry,” Arnie Kott muttered.

  Wincing at the sound, Jack Bohlen sniffed the woman's body beside him, saw shiny perspiration on her upper lip where a faint smear of her lipstick made her mouth look cut. He wanted to bite her lips, he wanted to make blood, there. His thumbs wanted to dig into her armpits and make an upward circle so that he worked her breasts, then he would feel they belonged to him to do with what he wanted. He had made them move already; it was fun.

  “What a shock,” she said. “You should spare us, Arnie. Your sense of humor—”

  “An accident,” Arnie said. He rummaged for another tape.

  Reaching out his hand Jack Bohlen touched the woman's lap. There was no underwear there beneath her skirt. He rubbed her legs and she drew her legs up and turned toward him so that her knees pressed into him; she sat like an animal, crouching in expectation. I can't wait to get you and me out of here and where we can be alone, Jack thought. God, how I want to feel you, and not through clothing. He closed his fingers around her bare ankle and she yapped with pain, smiling at him.

  “Listen, Jack,” Arnie Kott said, turning toward him. “I'm sorry—” His words were cut off. Jack did not hear the rest. The woman beside him was telling him something. Hurry, she was saying. I can't wait either. Her breath came in short, brisk hisses from her mouth, and she gazed at him fixedly, her face close to his, her eyes huge, as if she were impaled. Neither of them heard Arnie. The room, now, was silent.

  Had he missed something Arnie had said? Jack reached out and took hold of his glass, but there was nothing in it. “We're out of booze,” he said, setting it back down on the coffee table
.

  “God sake,” Arnie said. “I got to hear how you've done, Jack. Can't you give me anything?” Talking still, he moved away, from the living room into the kitchen; his voice dimmed. Beside Jack the woman still stared up at him, her mouth weak, as if he were holding her tightly to him, as if she could hardly breathe. We have to get out of this place and be by ourselves, Jack realized. Then, looking around, he saw that they were alone; Arnie had gone out of the room and could no longer see them. In the kitchen he was conversing with his tame Bleekman. And so he was already alone with her.

  “Not here,” Doreen said. But her body fluttered, it did not resist him as he squeezed her about the waist; she did not mind being squashed because she wanted to, too. She could not hold back either. “Yes,” she said. “But hurry.” Her nails dug into his shoulders and she shut her eyes tight, moaning and shuddering. “At the side,” she said. “It unbuttons, my skirt.”

  Bending over her he saw her languid, almost rotting beauty fall away. Yellow cracks spread through her teeth, and the teeth split and sank into her gums, which in turn became green and dry like leather, and then she coughed and spat up into his face quantities of dust. The Gubbler had gotten her, he realized, before he had been able to. So he let her go. She settled backward, her breaking bones making little sharp splintering sounds.

  Her eyes fused over, opaque, and from behind one eye the lashes became the furry, probing feet of a thick-haired insect stuck back there wanting to get out. Its tiny pin-head red eye peeped past the loose rim of her unseeing eye, and then withdrew; after that the insect squirmed, making the dead eye of the woman bulge, and then, for an instant, the insect peered through the lens of her eye, looked this way and that, saw him but was unable to make out who or what he was; it could not fully make use of the decayed mechanism behind which it lived.

  Like overripe puffballs, her boobies wheezed as they deflated into flatness, and from their dry interiors, through the web of cracks spreading across them, a cloud of spores arose and drifted up into his face, the smell of mold and age of the Gubbler, who had come and inhabited the inside long ago and was now working his way out to the surface.

  The dead mouth twitched and then from deep inside at the bottom of the pipe which was the throat a voice muttered, “You weren't fast enough.” And then the head fell off entirely, leaving the white pointed stick-like end of the neck projecting.

  Jack released her and she folded up into a little dried-up heap of flat, almost transparent plates, like the discarded skin of a snake, almost without weight; he brushed them away from him with his hand. And at the same time, to his surprise, he heard her voice from the kitchen.

  “Arnie, I think I'll go home. I really can't take much of Manfred; he never stops moving around, never sits still.” Turning his head he saw her in there, with Arnie, standing very close to him. She kissed him on the ear. “Good night, dear,” she said.

  “I read about a kid who thought he was a machine,” Arnie said, and then the kitchen door shut; Jack could neither hear nor see them.

  Rubbing his forehead he thought, I really am drunk. What's wrong with me? My mind, splitting…he blinked, tried to gather his faculties. On the rug, not far from the couch, Manfred Steiner cut out a picture from a magazine with blunt scissors, smiling to himself; the paper rustled as he cut it, a sound that distracted Jack and made it even more difficult for him to put in focus his wandering attention.

  From beyond the kitchen door he heard heavy breathing and then labored, prolonged grunts. What are they doing? he asked himself. The three of them, she and Arnie and the tame Bleekman, together…the grunts became slower and then ceased. There was no sound at all.

  I wish I was home, Jack said to himself with desperate, utter confusion. I want to get out of here, but how? He felt weak and terribly sick and he remained on the couch, where he was, unable to break away, to move or think.

  A voice in his mind said, Gubble gubble gubble, I am gubble gubble gubble gubble.

  Stop, he said to it.

  Gubble, gubble, gubble, gubble, it answered.

  Dust fell on him from the walls. The room creaked with age and dust, rotting around him. Gubble, gubble, gubble, the room said. The Gubbler is here to gubble gubble you and make you into gubbish.

  Getting unsteadily to his feet he managed to walk, step by step, over to Arnie's amplifier and tape recorder. He picked up a reel of tape and got the box open. After several faulty, feeble efforts he succeeded in putting it on the spindle of the transport.

  The door to the kitchen opened a crack, and an eye watched him; he could not tell whose it was.

  I have to get out of here, Jack Bohlen said to himself. Or fight it off; I have to break this, throw it away from me or be eaten.

  It is eating me up.

  He twisted the volume control convulsively so that the music blared up and deafened him, roared through the room, spilling over the walls, the furniture, lashing at the ajar kitchen door, attacking everyone and everything in sight.

  The kitchen door fell forward, its hinges breaking; it crashed over and a thing came hurriedly sideways from the kitchen, dislodged into belated activity by the roar of the music. The thing scrabbled up to him and past him, feeling for the volume control knob. The music ebbed.

  But he felt better. He felt sane, once more, thank God.

  Jack Bohlen dropped his father off at the abstract office and then, with Manfred, flew on to Lewistown, to Doreen Anderton's apartment.

  When she opened the door and saw him she said, “What is it, Jack?” She quickly held the door open and he and Manfred went on inside.

  “It's going to be very bad tonight,” he told her.

  “Are you sure?” She seated herself across from him. “Do you have to go at all? Yes, I suppose so. But maybe you're wrong.”

  Jack said, “Manfred has already told me. He's already seen it.”

  “Don't be scared,” Doreen said softly.

  “But I am,” he said.

  “Why will it be bad?”

  “I don't know. Manfred couldn't tell me that.”

  “But—” She gestured. “You've made contact with him; that's wonderful. That's what Arnie wants.”

  “I hope you'll be there,” Jack said.

  “Yes, I'll be there. But—there's not much I can do. Is my opinion worth anything? Because I'm positive that Arnie will be pleased; I think you're having an anxiety attack for no reason.”

  “It's the end,” Jack said, “between me and Arnie—tonight. I know it, and I don't know why.” He felt sick to his stomach. “It almost seems to me that Manfred does more than know the future; in some way he controls it, he can make it come out the worst possible way because that's what seems natural to him, that's how he sees reality. It's as if by being around him we're sinking into his reality. It's starting to seep over us and replace our own way of viewing things, and the kind of events we're accustomed to see come about now somehow don't come about. It's not natural for me to feel this way; I've never had this feeling about the future before.”

  He was silent, then.

  “You've been around him too much,” Doreen said. “Tendencies in you that are—” She hesitated. “Unstable tendencies, Jack. Allied to his; you were supposed to draw him into our world, the shared reality of our society…instead, hasn't he drawn you into his own? I don't think there's any precognition; I think it's been a mistake from the start. It would be better if you got out of it, if you left that boy—” She glanced toward Manfred, who had gone to the window of her apartment to stare out at the street below. “If you didn't have anything more to do with him.”

  “It's too late for that,” Jack said.

  “You're not a psychotherapist or a doctor,” Doreen said. “It's one thing for Milton Glaub to be in close contact day after day with autistic and schizophrenic persons, but you—you're a repairman who blundered into this because of a crazy impulse on Arnie's part; you just happened to be there in the same room with him fixing his encoder and so you w
ound up with this. You shouldn't be so passive, Jack. You're letting your life be shaped by chance, and for God's sake—don't you recognize that passivity for what it is?”

  After a pause he said, “I suppose I do.”

  “Say it.”

  He said, “There's a tendency for a schizophrenic individual to be passive; I know that.”

  “Be decisive; don't go any further with this. Call Arnie and tell him you're simply not competent to handle Manfred. He should be back at Camp B-G where Milton Glaub can work with him. They can build that slowed-down chamber there; they were starting to, weren't they?”

  “They'll never get around to it. They're talking about importing the equipment from Home; you know what that means.”

  “And you'll never get around to it,” Doreen said, “because, long before you do, you'll have cracked up mentally. I can look into the future too; you know what I see? I see you having a much more serious collapse than ever before; I see—total psychological collapse for you, Jack, if you keep working on this. Already you're being mauled by acute schizophrenic anxiety, by panic—isn't that so? Isn't it?”

  He nodded.

  “I saw that in my brother,” Doreen said. “Schizophrenic panic, and once you see it break out in a person, you can never forget it. The collapse of their reality around them…the collapse of their perceptions of time and space, cause and effect…and isn't that what's happening to you? You're talking as if this meeting with Arnie can't be altered by anything you do—and that's a deep regression on your part from adult responsibility and maturity; that's not like you at all.” Breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling painfully, she went on, “I'll call Arnie and tell him you're pulling out, and he'll have to get someone else to finish with Manfred. And I'll tell him that you've made no progress, that it's pointless for you and for him to continue with this. I've seen Arnie get these whims before; he keeps them percolating for a few days or weeks, and then he forgets them. He can forget this.”