Atoms and Evil: Robert Bloch's Tales of Terror

  “We’ll leave them both here in Inventory,” she said. “If we need them we can always send for them. But I hope we never do.”

  Henson was finally forced to agree. He and Lita had both given their immobilization commands to the surrogates, and they were placed in their metal cabinets ready to be filed away—“Just like corpses!” Lita had shuddered. “We’re looking at ourselves after we’re dead.”

  And that had ended the episode. For a while, Henson made suggestions about using the surrogates—there were occasions he’d have liked to take advantage of a substitute for token public appearances—but Lita continued to object. And so, for two years now, the robots had been on file. Henson paid his taxes and fees on them annually and that was all.

  That was all, until lately. Until Lita’s unexplained silences and still more inexplicable absences had started Henson thinking. Thinking and worrying. Worrying and watching. Watching and waiting. Waiting to catch her, waiting to kill her—

  So he’d remembered psychotherapy, and had gone to his Adjustor. Lucky the man was a friend of his; a friend of both of them, rather. Actually, Lita had known him longer than her husband. But they’d been very close,’the three of them, and he knew the Adjustor would understand.

  He could trust the Adjustor not to tell Lita. He could trust the Adjustor to have everything ready and waiting for him now.

  Henson went up to the office. The papers were ready for him to sign. The two metal boxes containing the surrogates were already placed on the loaders ready for transport to wherever he designated. But the Adjustor wasn’t on hand to greet him.

  “Special assignment in Manila,” the Second explained to him. “But he left instructions about your case, Mr. Henson. All you have to do is sign the responsibility slips. And of course, you’ll be in Monday for the official report.”

  Henson nodded. Now that the moment was so near at hand he was impatient of details. He could scarcely wait until the micro-dupes were completed and the Register Board signalled clearance. Two common robots were requisitioned to carry the metal cases down to the gyro and load them in. Henson whizzed back home with them and they brought the cases up to his living-level. Then he dismissed them, and he was alone.

  He was alone. He could open the cases now. First, his own. He slid back the cover, gazed down at the perfect duplicate of his own body, sleeping peacefully for two serene years since its creation. Henson stared curiously at his pseudo-countenance. He’d aged a bit in two years, but the surrogate was ageless. It could survive the ravage of centuries, and it was always at peace. Always at peace. He almost envied it. The surrogate didn’t love, couldn’t hate, wouldn’t know the gnawing torture of suspicion that led to this shaking, quaking, aching lust to kill—

  Henson shoved the lid back and lifted the metal case upright, then dragged it along the wall to a storage cabinet. A domestic-model could have done it for him, but Lita didn’t like domestic-models. She wouldn’t permit even a common robot in her home.

  Lita and her likes and dislikes! Damn her and them too!

  Henson ripped the lid down on the second file.

  There she was; the beautiful, harlot-eyed, blonde, lying, adorable, dirty, gorgeous, loathsome, heavenly, filthy little goddess of a slut!

  He remembered the command word to awake her. It almost choked him now but he said it.

  “Beloved!”

  Nothing happened. Then he realized why. He’d been almost snarling. He had to change the pitch of his voice. He tried again, softly. “Beloved!”

  She moved. Her breasts rose and fell, rose and fell. She opened her eyes. She held out her arms and smiled She stood up and came close to him, without a word.

  Henson stared at her. She was newly-born and innocent, she had no secrets, she wouldn’t betray him. How could he harm her? How could he harm her when she lifted her face in expectation of a kiss?

  But she was Lita. He had to remember that. She was Lita, and Lita was hiding something from him and she must be punished, would be punished.

  Suddenly, Henson became conscious of his hands. There was a tingling in his wrists and it ran down through the strong muscles and sinews to the fingers, and the fingers flexed and unflexed with exultant vigor, and then they rose and curled around the surrogate’s throat, around Lita’s throat, and they were squeezing and squeezing and the surrogate, Lita, tried to move away and the scream was almost real and the popping eyes were almost real and the purpling face was almost real, only nothing was real any more except the hands and the choking and the surging sensation of strength.

  And then it was over. He dragged the limp, dangling mechanism (it was only a mechanism now, just as the hate was only a memory) to the waste-jet and fed the surrogate to the flame. He turned the aperture wide and thrust the metal case in, too.

  Then Henson slept, and he did not dream. For the first time in months he did not dream, because it was over and he was himself again. The therapy was complete.

  “So that’s how it was.” Henson sat in the Adjustor’s office, and the Monday morning sun was strong on his face.

  “Good.” The Adjustor smiled and ran a hand across the top of his curly head. “And how did you and Lita enjoy your weekend? Fish biting?”

  “We didn’t fish,” said Henson. “We talked.”

  “Oh?”

  “I figured I’d have to tell her what happened, sooner or later. So I did.”

  “How did she take it?”

  “Very well, at first.”

  “And then—?”

  “I asked her some questions.”

  “Yes.”

  “She answered them.”

  “You mean she told you what she’d been hiding?”

  “Not willingly. But she told me. After I told her about my own little check-up.”

  “What was that?”

  “I did some calling Friday night. She wasn’t in Saigon with her mother.”

  “No?”

  “And you weren’t in Manila on a special case, either.” Henson leaned forward. “The two of you were together, in New Singapore! I checked it and she admitted it.”

  The Adjustor sighed. “So now you know,” he said.

  “Yes. Now I know. Now I know what she’s been concealing from me. What you’ve both been concealing.”

  “Surely you’re not jealous about that?” the Adjustor asked. “Not in this modern day and age when—”

  “She says she wants to have a child by you,” Henson said. “She refused to bear one for me. But she wants yours. She told me so.”

  “What do you want to do about it?” the Adjustor asked.

  “You tell me,” Henson murmured. “That’s why I’ve come to you. You’re my Adjustor.”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “I’d like to kill you,” Henson said. “I’d like to blow off the top of your head with a pocket-blast.”

  “Not a bad idea.” The Adjustor nodded. “I’ll have my robot ready whenever you say.”

  “At my place,” said Henson. “Tonight.”

  “Good enough. I’ll send it there to you.”

  “One thing more.” Henson gulped for a moment. “In order for it to do any good, Lita must watch.”

  It was the Adjustor’s turn to gulp, now. “You mean you’re going to force her to see you go through with this?”

  “I told her and she agreed,” Henson said.

  “But, think of the effect on her, man!”

  “Think of the effect on me. Do you want me to go mad?”

  “No,” said the Adjustor. “You’re right. It’s therapy. I’ll send the robot around at eight. Do you need a pocket-blast requisition?”

  “I have one,” said Henson.

  “What instructions shall I give my surrogate?” the Adjustor asked.

  Henson told him. He was brutally explicit, and midway in his statement the Adjustor looked away, coloring. “So the two of you will be together, just as if you were real, and then I’ll come in and—”

  The Adjus
tor shuddered a little, then managed a smile. “Sound therapy,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it will be.”

  That’s the way Henson wanted it, and that’s the way he had it—up to a point.

  He burst into the room around quarter after eight and found the two of them waiting for him. There was Lita, and there was the Adjustor’s surrogate. The surrogate had been well-instructed; it looked surprised and startled. Lita needed no instruction; hers was an agony of shame.

  Henson had the pocket-blast in his hand, cocked at the ready. He aimed.

  Unfortunately, he was just a little late. The surrogate sat up gracefully and slid one hand under the pillow. The hand came up with another pocket-blast aimed and fired all in one motion.

  Henson teetered, tottered, and fell. The whole left side of his face sheared away as he went down.

  Lita screamed.

  Then the surrogate put his arms around her and whispered, “It’s all over, darling. All over. We did it! He really thought I was a robot, that I’d go through with his aberrated notion of dramatizing his revenge.”

  The Adjustor smiled and lifted her face to his. “From now on you and I will always be together. We’ll have our child, lots of children if you wish. There’s nothing to come between us now.”

  “But you killed him,” Lita whispered. “What will they do to you?”

  “Nothing. It was self-defense. Don’t forget, I’m an Adjustor. From the moment he came into my office, everything he did or said was recorded during our interviews. The evidence will show that I tried to humor him, that I indicated his mental unbalance and allowed him to work out his own therapy.

  “This last interview, today, will not be a part of the record. I’ve already destroyed it. So as far as the law is concerned, he had no grounds for jealousy or suspicion. I happened to stop in here to visit this evening and found him trying to kill you—the actual you. And when he turned on me, I blasted him in self-defense.”

  “Will you get away with it?”

  “Of course I’ll get away with it. The man was aberrated, and the record will show it.”

  The Adjustor stood up. “I’m going to call Authority now,” he said.

  Lita rose and put her hand on his shoulders. “Kiss me first,” she whispered. “A real kiss. I like real things.”

  “Real things,” said the Adjustor. She snuggled against him, but he made no move to take her in his arms. He was staring down at Henson.

  Lita followed his gaze.

  Both of them saw it at the same time, then—both of them saw the torn hole in the left side of Henson’s head, and the thin strands of wire protruding from the opening.

  “He didn’t come,” the Adjustor murmured. “He must have suspected, and he sent his robot instead.”

  Lita began to shake. “You were to send your robot, but you didn’t. He was to come himself, but he sent his robot. Each of you double-crossed the other, and now—”

  And now the door opened very quickly.

  Henson came into the room.

  He looked at his surrogate lying on the floor. He looked at Lita. He looked at the Adjustor. Then he grinned. There was no madness in his grin, only deliberation.

  There was deliberation in the way he raised the pocket-blast. He aimed well and carefully, fired only once, but both the Adjustor and Lita crumpled in the burst.

  Henson bent over the bodies, inspecting them carefully to make sure that they were real. He was beginning to appreciate Lita’s philosophy now. He liked real things.

  For that matter, the Adjustor had some good ideas, too. This business of dramatizing aggressions really seemed to work. He didn’t feel at all angry or upset any more, just perfectly calm and at peace with the world.

  Henson rose, smiled, and walked towards the door. For the first time in years he felt completely adjusted.

  TALENT

  IT is perhaps a pity that nothing is known of Andrew Benson’s parents.

  The same reasons which prompted them to leave him as a foundling on the steps of the St. Andrews Orphanage also caused them to maintain a discreet anonymity. The event occurred on the morning of March 3rd, 1943—the war era, as you probably recall—so in a way the child may be regarded as a wartime casualty. Similar occurrences were by no means rare during those days, even in Pasadena, where the Orphanage was located.

  After the usual tentative and fruitless inquiries, the good Sisters took him in. It was there that he acquired his first name, from the patron and patronymic saint of the establishment. The “Benson” was added some years later, by the couple who eventually adopted him.

  It is difficult, at this late date, to determine what sort of a child Andrew was; orphanage records are sketchy, at best, and Sister Rosemarie, who acted as supervisor of the boys’ dormitory is long since dead. Sister Albertine, the primary grades teacher of the Orphanage School, is now—to put it as delicately as possible—in her senility, and her testimony is necessarily colored by knowledge of subsequent events.

  That Andrew never learned to talk until he was nearly seven years old seems almost incredible; the forced gregarity and the conspicuous lack of individual attention characteristic of orphanage upbringing would make it appear as though the ability to speak is necessary for actual survival in such an environment from infancy onward. Scarcely more credible is Sister Albertine’s theory that Andrew knew how to talk but merely refused to do so until he was well into his seventh year.

  For what it is worth, she now remembers him as an unusually precocious youngster, who appeared to possess an intelligence and understanding far beyond his years. Instead of employing speech, however, he relied on pantomime, an art at which he was so brilliantly adept (if Sister Albertine is to be believed) that his continuing silence seemed scarcely noticeable.

  “He could imitate anybody,” she declares. “The other children, the Sisters, even the Mother Superior. Of course I had to punish him for that. But it was remarkable, the way he was able to pick up all the little mannerisms and facial expressions of another person, just at a glance. And that’s all it took for Andrew—just a mere glance.

  “Visitors’ Day was Sunday. Naturally, Andrew never had any visitors, but he liked to hang around the corridor and watch them come in. And afterwards, in the dormitory at night, he’d put in a regular performance for the other boys. He could impersonate every single man, woman or child who’d come to the Orphanage that day—the way they walked, the way they moved, every action and gesture. Even though he never said a word, nobody made the mistake of thinking Andrew was mentally deficient. For a while, Dr. Clement had the idea he might be a mute.”

  Dr. Roger Clement is one of the few persons who might be able to furnish more objective data concerning Andrew Benson’s early years. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1954; a victim of a fire which also destroyed his home and his office files.

  It was Dr. Clement who attended Andrew on the night that he saw his first motion picture.

  The date was 1949, some Saturday evening in the late fall of the year. The Orphanage received and showed one film a week, and only children of school age were permitted to attend. Andrew’s inability—or unwillingness—to speak had caused some difficulty when he entered primary grades that September, and several months went by before he was allowed to join his classmates in the auditorium for the Saturday night screenings. But it is known that he eventually did so.

  The picture was the last (and probably the least) of the Marx Brothers movies. Its title was Love Happy, and if it is remembered by the general public at all today, that is due to the fact that the film contained a brief walk-on appearance by a then-unknown blonde bit player named Marilyn Monroe.

  But the Orphanage audience had other reasons for regarding it as memorable. Because Love Happy was the picture that sent Andrew Benson into his trance.

  Long after the lights came up again in the auditorium the child sat there, immobile, his eyes staring glassily at the blank screen. When his companions noticed and
sought to arouse him he did not respond; one of the Sisters (possibly Sister Rosemarie) shook him, and he promptly collapsed in a dead faint. Dr. Clement was summoned, and he administered to the patient. Andrew Benson did not recover consciousness until the following morning.

  And it was then that he talked.

  He talked immediately, he talked perfectly, he talked fluently—but not in the manner of a six-year-old child. The voice that issued from his lips was that of a middle-aged man. It was a nasal, rasping voice, and even without the accompanying grimaces and facial expressions it was instantaneously and unmistakably recognizable as the voice of Groucho Marx.

  Andrew Benson mimicked Groucho in his Sam Grunion role to perfection, word for word. Then he “did” Chico Marx. After that he relapsed into silence again, and for a moment it was thought he had reverted to his mute phase. But it was an eloquent silence, and soon it became evident that he was imitating Harpo. In rapid succession, Andrew created recognizable vocal and visual portraits of Raymond Burr, Melville Cooper, Eric Blore and the other actors who played small roles in the picture. His impersonations seemed uncanny to his companions, and the Sisters were not unimpressed.

  “Why, he even looked like Groucho,” Sister Albertine insists.

  Ignoring the question of how a towheaded moppet of six can achieve a physical resemblance to Groucho Marx without benefit (or detriment) of make-up, it is nevertheless an established fact that Andrew Benson gained immediate celebrity as a mimic within the small confines of the Orphanage.

  And from that moment on, he talked regularly, if not freely. That is to say, he replied to direct questions, he recited his lessons in the classroom, and responded with the outward forms of politeness required by Orphanage discipline. But he was never loquacious, or even communicative, in the ordinary sense. The only time he became spontaneously articulate was immediately following the showing of a weekly movie.

  There was no recurrence of his initial seizure, but each Saturday night screening brought in its wake a complete dramatic recapitulation by the gifted youngster. During the fall of ’49 and the winter of ’50, Andrew Benson saw many movies. There was Sorrowful Jones, with Bob Hope; Tarzan’s Magic Fountain; The Fighting O’Flynn; The Life of Riley; Little Women, and a number of other films, current and older. Naturally, these pictures were subject to approval by the Sisters before being shown, and as a result movies depicting or emphasizing violence were not included. Still, several Westerns reached the Orphanage screen, and it is significant that Andrew Benson reacted in what was to become a characteristic fashion.