A gust of cold wind blew suddenly into the streetside cafe. Marsh shivered a little. “Dummies? Puppets?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Of course,” Marsh said, “We’re among the real people, you and me. Or else we would never be talking about it like this.”
Davenport chuckled. “I don’t know about you. But I’m real.”
That conversation, nothing but a beery bit of time-passing speculation then, now took on a sharp-focussed immediacy.
Marylin was bustling around the kitchen, taking two cans of beer from the refrigerator, opening them (a little spray of beer frothed up at her, the way it always did), pouring them carefully, so as not to put heads on them, into the tall pilsner glasses Marsh had bought one day about three years before.
She looked real.
The freshness of her smile, the whiteness of her teeth, the trim little figure and the yellow-brown hair—
Real?
Or the work of an ingenious puppet-master?
Sweat beaded Marsh’s face. He said, “Marylin—when I came through the door a little while ago—I thought there was something funny about the way you looked.”
“Funny? Why, what could you mean?” She efficiently cleared away the empty beer cans and set Marsh’s drink on the table before him.
He groped for words. “I mean—you looked sort of vacant. Like an empty body someone had hung up to dry. I almost got the feeling you had been standing like that for two years, ever since I was drafted. That you’ve just been carefully designed as a toy for me. That you aren’t real at all, Marylin. Not really real.”
She looked searchingly at him. “Phil, let me touch your forehead. You must have caught something when you were overseas. Malaria, or something that affects the brain.”
He shook her hand away.
Maybe I am crazy, he thought. Brain-fever. This is no way to be talking to my wife ten minutes after coming home from Germany.
But Davenport’s mocking words bit into him, drifting back clear and sharp.
He sipped his beer.
“Phil—”
“Eh?”
“Those things you said a minute ago. You were kidding, weren’t you? It’s just some crazy thing, some joke you heard overseas. About being real.”
“Oh—yeah, sure. Sure, kid. Don’t listen to me too seriously. The sight of you makes me a little slaphappy, that’s all.”
But he was thinking: If there’s just a few of us real ones and Marylin’s only a puppet, I ought to be able to turn her on and off whenever I felt like it. What good’s a toy you can’t turn on and off?
He thought about it a while. Turned it over six different ways in his mind, while Marylin carried away the empty beer glasses, washed them, moved around the kitchen tidying things up. She looked real, lovely, desirable.
He decided to test it.
“Marylin?”
“Yes, Phil?”
“Stop. Just stop. Freeze. I’m turning you off like the puppet you are. Pretend I never came back from the Army. Pretend you’re still frozen here, waiting for me.”
He expected her to giggle scornfully, or to get angry, or to react in any one of the ways Marylin would react to such a ridiculous request. But she didn’t do any of those things, though.
She froze.
One minute she was Marylin, smiling, breathing, lovingly grinning at him. A minute later she was the slack jawed empty thing he had seen when he came in, rigid, vacant-eyed, drained of all life and personality and motion.
He walked up to the thing that had been his wife and gently touched her forehead. It was cold. The warmth that had been Marylin was just part of the illusion.
Illusion. He felt chilled.
“Come out of it,” he said hoarsely. “Wake up, Marylin. Unfreeze.”
It was as if a light-switch had been turned; she awoke, life flowing back into her.
“What was that you said, Phil? I’m afraid I didn’t quite hear yo—”
“Freeze.”
She froze again. On, off. Flick, flick. Just a puppet.
Marsh walked to the window and looked outside. It was just an ordinary Brooklyn afternoon, kids coming home from school, a punch-ball game going on in the street, a young mother rocking her baby to sleep across the way where it was sunny, a policeman directing traffic at the big intersection up ahead.
He looked back at the empty Marylin. He wondered how much of the world was illusion, how much real. He wondered how he had stumbled into this nightmare.
I would have been better off if I never met that devil Davenport, he thought bitterly. He started me thinking about this. If I hadn’t started it I’d still be happy, still have Marylin. And the whole damned world.
Almost without knowing what he was doing he slipped on a jacket that had hung in his closet two years, walked past the frozen Marylin-thing, past his abandoned duffel-bag, and out the door. He didn’t bother locking it.
He started down the stairs. A creaking sound came from below, and a fat figure rounded the balustrade on the second floor. Mrs. Giovanetti, the landlady.
Her round little eyes beamed as she caught sight of him. “Why, Mr. Marsh! You weren’t supposed to be back till Friday, and I was going to bake a cake for—”
“Freeze,” he said. “Turn yourself off.”
Mrs. Giovanetti seemed to slump into herself and stood lumplike on the stairs like a potato sack. Shuddering, Marsh walked around her and continued on down. He wished he had come back on Friday. If he hadn’t caught Marylin by surprise that way, this wouldn’t be happening.
He came out into the bright clean sunlight. A boy and a dog came by: the boy about eight, dirty-faced, the dog a wire-haired terrier that didn’t like being held on its leash.
“Hey, kid.”
“Yeah, mister?”
“I’m tired of you. Stop being alive.”
The boy became a statue of a boy. And the terrier stopped straining at the leash and froze, just like that, leaning forward with its tongue half out.
Marsh kept going.
The delivery boy bringing up the groceries—a pimple-faced teenager who was probably worrying about the draft himself. Marsh froze him, extracted the pseudo-life with a word.
The policeman waving the cars on became a blue-clad statue. The cars obediently stopped; Marsh stepped off the sidewalk and came over to the driver of the first car.
He was a balding man in his fifties. He leaned out the open window and Marsh froze him. A Buick behind them started to honk. Marsh made the honking stop.
A cold sort of numbness grew in him as he moved on down the block, heading toward the subway. His feet were taking him on; he had no idea of where he was going, or why. But it took just a word to drain life from the puppets he met.
At the corner newsstand, an old woman was sitting behind a stack of newspapers. Marsh put down a dime, picked up a paper, and froze her. He took back his dime. The newspaper had all the usual news, the crises and the Presidential statements, the UN debates and the baseball scores. The Dodgers were in third place, battling for second. The President was returning from his vacation, smiling, tanned, healthy-looking.
“Is it all a game?” Marsh asked out loud. “Played out for my benefit only? Am I the only real one?”
It looked that way.
“What’s that, Mister?” a passing truckdriver asked. “You got troubles?”
Marsh froze him too.
He moved on…on through this world of stringless puppets that danced out their dramas for him. He wondered if it went on this way all over the world, or just where he was. He had been in Germany, seen the frauleins and gulped the bock beer. Was Germany frozen in pseudo-death now that he was in America? For that matter, did people freeze every time he looked the other way?
There wasn’t any way of finding that out, he thought.
I’m the only one that’s real. In the whole damned world.
It was a shocking, numbing realization.
He reached the subway; busy
shoppers jostled past him as if they didn’t know he could stop them in their tracks with a word, or perhaps a thought or a sour look. Marsh scooped change out of his pockets and scowled when he saw he had no tokens. The line at the change-booth was ten or twelve people long.
But there was an easy solution. He moved up the line, freezing them as he went, and reached the front. The change-booth keeper was staring pop-eyed at him.
“You can freeze too,” Marsh said. He reached into the booth and took a token for himself. What did stealing fifteen cents matter now? What did anything matter?
It was like moving through a world of soap-bubbles that popped at his command.
The uptown express came along, crowded. Marsh stepped inside and rode silently to Manhattan, listening to the conversations going on all around him, to the flapping of mouths with no meaning intended. Bitterly he glanced from one face to another. Behind the flickering eyes, behind the faces and the smiles—nothing, he thought. Just emptiness.
The train arrived at Grand Central. Marsh stepped out, stuck his head back into the train, and said, “I’m tired of all of you. Stop!”
Conversation died away. Marsh left the train, conscious of the trail of demolition he was leaving behind him, knowing that none of it mattered at all.
It was funny, he thought, how your world could fall apart like this. Your nice, normal world, with a pretty wife and a house in Brooklyn and your army discharge papers in your pocket, becoming nothing but puppetry and illusion. Soap-bubbles.
He stepped out of the subway station at Madison and 42nd. Traffic whizzed by; busy people were heading home for dinner. The streets were jammed.
Marsh cupped his hands and yelled, “Anyone who can hear this, stop! I order you! Me!”
Within a radius of twenty feet or so, all life stopped. He was surrounded by a circle of statues, of tree-trunks that had been people.
He walked down 42nd, heading westward, stopping all life as he went. The spectacle of New York’s busiest street silent, lifeless, clotted with New Yorkers frozen where they stood, was awesome, almost terrifying.
For what? Why was all this done? he asked. And am I the only real one?
Times Square was thronged with people, thousands of them ebbing forward toward the subway kiosks. A barker was huckstering for a sight-seeing tour of the city. With sudden inspiration, Marsh froze him and snatched his megaphone from his numb hands.
Veins stood out on Marsh’s throat as he yelled his command to the thousands in Times Square. And they began to stop; the toys ceased moving.
All except one.
Marsh waited, and a nerve in his cheek began to quiver. A tall, casual-looking man was weaving his way through the clusters of stiffened pedestrians, his face grim, his lips clamped together.
It was Harry Davenport.
Marsh let the megaphone drop and waited for Davenport to approach.
“Look here, Marsh—you can’t go about doing this! You’re wrecking the whole show! I’ve followed you up all the way from Brooklyn. Do you have any idea how much confusion you’ve caused?”
“It’s your fault,” Marsh said accusingly. “If you had kept that mouth of yours shut—”
“Oh, come now.”
“Don’t give me that! If you had shut up, I wouldn’t ever have found out about this! The world was a nice place. I liked it. And now look what you’ve done!”
“Couldn’t you always turn everyone back on again, Marsh? It’s no harder than turning them off.”
Marsh scowled unhappily. “And could I live with them any more, knowing they were all just puppets? No, Davenport. I’ll turn the whole damned puppet show off.” He waved his arms, encompassing all of Times Square. “The whole world will be just as frozen and as dead as Times Square. Dammit, this didn’t have to happen.”
Davenport said, “You made it happen. You didn’t have to take me seriously.”
“Well, I did. And I’ll turn you off too. Go on—freeze!”
Marsh waited. But Davenport did not freeze. He continued to frown grimly, to breathe, to blink his eyes.
“It didn’t work,” Marsh said. “You’re the first one it hasn’t worked on. That means—you must be real, too! So I have to share the world with you? How many of us are there, Davenport?”
The tall man shook his head sadly. “Only about a dozen, Marsh. We found out about…things, and we created things for our own amusement. We didn’t expect you to become so violent when you found out the truth. But your destructiveness has been, in its way, amusing. We tire of it, though.”
“So what? What can you do to stop me?”
“A great deal.” Davenport looked very sad. “There are different levels of realness, Marsh. The lowest you see around you—people with no life of their own, who can be turned on and off at will. Then there are those who are truly real. And then a third kind, intermediate, whom we create for special diversion. Such as you. But you’ve overdone your job. We can’t have you upsetting everything.”
“Me? You’re crazy!” Marsh burst out. “I’m just as real as you are, and—”
He never finished the sentence. Shrugging his shoulders sadly, Davenport spoke the words that would turn Marsh off.
A TIME FOR REVENGE
(1957)
While I was in the midst of toiling away for William Hamling and Howard Browne, doing seven or eight short stories a month for those editors alone, a new magazine came out of nowhere that wanted much the same kind of action-adventure material, was willing to buy every story I brought in, and would pay two cents a word for it—twice the price stories for Hamling or Browne were bringing me, and quite a substantial figure in that far-off era, when the income from one 10,000-word story that took me two days to write would cover a month’s rent on my handsome Manhattan apartment, with enough left over to pay for dinner for two at a good restaurant.
It was a young writer named Harlan Ellison, who had come to New York from the Midwest in the winter of 1954-55 and taken a room next door to mine in the ramshackle residence hotel near Columbia University where I lived in my college days, who got this one going. Like me, he had been an avid science-fiction reader who longed to have his own stories published in the magazines he had read in his teens, and by the spring of 1956 he had begun selling them to many of the same magazines I was writing for. He had discovered, though, that he also had a knack for writing hard-boiled crime stories—tales of life among the juvenile-delinquent kid-gangs of New York became a specialty of his—and had opened a market for himself at the small house of Crestwood Publishing Company, which had just started two crime-fiction magazines, Trapped and Guilty. Harlan went downtown to visit their editor, one W.W. Scott, at his office near Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, and began rapidly to sell him dark, harsh crime stories at the premium rate of a cent and a half a word. He was kind enough to let me in on this bonanza, and, busy as I was turning out science fiction for all my regular markets, I started doing crime stories too. My records show the sale of “Get Out and Stay Out” to Guilty in June, 1956, right about the time I received my Columbia degree, and “Clinging Vine” to the companion magazine, Trapped, a couple of weeks later.
And then W.W. Scott, acting on a suggestion from Harlan, talked his publisher into bringing out a science-fiction magazine as well, to be called Super Science Stories. Since Scott knew next to nothing about science fiction, and Harlan and I had a great familiarity with it, he asked us to supply him—right away—with as many stories as we could provide. The magazine would come out every two months and pay even better than the crime-fiction titles: a very respectable two cents a word. Suddenly Harlan and I had the inside track on a lucrative new market.
Scott—“Scottie,” Harlan called him, though he preferred to be called “Bill”—was a short, cheerfully cantankerous old guy who would have fit right into a 1950s Hollywood movie about old-time newspapermen, which is what I think he had been before he drifted into magazine editing. The main activity of his employer, Crestwood, was producing slick me
n’s magazines with names like True Men and Man’s Life. Scottie was the one-man fiction-magazine department, with a tiny office of his own, a room just about big enough for a desk, a bookcase, and a shelf for holding recently submitted manuscripts. To us—and we both were barely past 21—he looked to be seventy or eighty years old, but probably he was 55 or thereabouts. His voice was a high-pitched cackle; he had a full set of top and bottom dentures, which he didn’t always bother to wear; and I never saw him without his green eyeshade, which evidently he regarded as an essential part of the editorial costume. He freely admitted to us that he had hardly any knowledge of science fiction, other than it had something to do with alien beings and robots and things like that, and he invited us to bring him as much material as we could manage to produce.
It was like being handed the key to Fort Knox. Two cents a word, for all the stories we could write! I brought him the first one in late June—“Collecting Team,” I called it, but Scottie turned out to be a compulsive title-changer, and when he published it as the lead story in the first issue of Super-Science Fiction he called it “Catch ’Em All Alive.” Others followed—plenty of them. Super-Science lasted eighteen issues over the next three years, and, because Harlan was careless enough to get himself drafted in 1957 and spent the next two years on an army base, while I remained a civilian, the task of keeping the magazine filled fell largely to me. Of the 120 stories that Super-Science published, I wrote nearly a third, 36 in all, one or more in every issue except the second, for which I was too busy with other projects to turn anything in.
Scottie never rejected anything I brought him. They ran under my own name and under such pseudonyms as “Eric Rodman,” “Richard F. Watson,” “Alex Merriman,” “Dan Malcolm,” and any number of others. Most of them followed what I had helped to define as the Super-Science formula, stories set on alien planets with vivid scenery, involving hard-bitten characters who very often arrived at bleak ends. I suspect I derived the manner and some of the content from the South Seas stories of Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham, both favorite writers of mine. The variations I could ring on the themes of extraterrestrial colonists or exploration teams in deep galactic trouble were endless, and for three jolly years I supported myself very nicely from this one market alone.