“A step up,” Stuart said.
“Yes,” Hoppy mumbled. “A step up. I’m like everybody else; in fact I’m better than anybody else. I can do anything they can do and a lot more. I can go wherever I want, and they can’t. They can’t move.”
“Why can’t they move?” the frycook demanded.
“Just can’t,” Hoppy said. “They can’t go into the air or on roads or ships; they just stay. It’s all different from this. I can see each of them, like they’re dead, like they’re pinned down and dead. Like corpses.”
“Can they talk?” Connie asked.
“Yes,” the phoce said, “they can converse with each other. But—they have to—” He was silent, and then he smiled; his thin, twisted face showed joy. “They can only talk through me.”
I wonder what that means, Stuart thought. It sounds like a megalomaniacal daydream, where he rules the world. Compensation because he’s defective … just what you’d expect a phoce to imagine.
It did not seem so interesting to Stuart, now that he had realized that. He moved away, back toward his booth, where his lunch waited.
The frycook was saying, “Is it a good world, there? Tell me if it’s better than this or worse.”
“Worse,” Hoppy said. And then he said, “Worse for you. It’s what everybody deserves; it’s justice.”
“Better for you, then,” Connie said, in a questioning way.
“Yes,” the phoce said.
“Listen,” Stuart said to the waitress from where he sat, “can’t you see it’s just psychological compensation because he’s defective? It’s how he keeps going, imagining that. I don’t see how you can take it seriously.”
“I don’t take it seriously,” Connie said. “But it’s interesting; I’ve read about mediums, like they’re called. They go into trances and can commune with the next world, like he’s doing. Haven’t you ever heard of that? It’s a scientific fact, I think. Isn’t it, Tony?” She turned to the frycook for support.
“I don’t know,” Tony said moodily, walking slowly back to his grill to pick up his spatula.
The phoce, now, seemed to have fallen deeper into his beer-induced trance; he seemed asleep, in fact, no longer seeing anything or at least no longer conscious of the people around him or attempting to communicate his vision—or whatever it was—to them. The séance was over.
Well, you never know, Stuart said to himself. I wonder what Fergesson would say to this; I wonder if he’d want somebody who’s not only physically crippled but an epileptic or whatever working for him. I wonder if I should or shouldn’t mention this to him when I get back to the store. If he hears he’ll probably fire Hoppy right on the spot; I wouldn’t blame him. So maybe I better not say anything, he decided.
The phoce’s eyes opened. In a weak voice he said, “Stuart.”
“What do you want?” Stuart answered.
“I—” The phoce sounded frail, almost ill, as if the experience had been too much for his weak body. “Listen, I wonder…” He drew himself up, then rolled his cart slowly over to Stuart’s booth. In a low voice he said, “I wonder, could you push me back to the store? Not right now but when you’re through eating. I’d really appreciate it.”
“Why?” Stuart said. “Can’t you do it?”
“I don’t feel good,” the phoce said.
Stuart nodded. “Okay. When I’m finished eating.”
“Thanks,” the phoce said.
Ignoring him stonily, Stuart continued eating. I wish it wasn’t obvious I know him, he thought to himself. I wish he’d wheel off and wait somewhere else. But the phoce had sat down, rubbing his forehead with the left extensor, looking too spent to move away again, even to his place at the other end of the coffee shop.
Later, as Stuart pushed the phoce in his cart back up the sidewalk toward Modern TV, the phoce said in a low voice,
“It’s a big responsibility, to see beyond.”
“Yeah,” Stuart murmured, maintaining his remoteness, doing his duty only, no more; he pushed the cart and that was all. Just because I’m pushing you, he thought, doesn’t mean I have to converse with you.
“The first time it happened,” the phoce went on, but Stuart cut him off.
“I’m not interested.” He added, “I just want to get back and see if they fired off the rocket yet. It’s probably in orbit by now.”
“I guess so,” the phoce said.
At the intersection they waited for the light to change.
“The first time it happened,” the phoce said, “it scared me.” As Stuart pushed him across the street he went on, “I knew right away what it was I was seeing. The smoke and the fires … everything all smudged. Like a mining pit or a place where they process slag. Awful.” He shuddered. “But is this so terrific the way it is now? Not for me.”
“I like it,” Stuart said shortly.
“Naturally,” the phoce said. “You’re not a biological sport.”
Stuart grunted.
“You know what my earliest memory from childhood is?” the phoce said in a quiet voice. “Being carried to church in a blanket. Laid out on a pew like a—” His voice broke. “Carried in and out in that blanket, inside it, so no one could see me. That was my mother’s idea. She couldn’t stand my father carrying me on his back, where people could see.”
Stuart grunted.
“This is a terrible world,” the phoce said. “Once you Negroes had to suffer; if you lived in the South you’d be suffering now. You forget all about that because they let you forget, but me—they don’t let me forget. Anyhow, I don’t want to forget, about myself I mean. In the next world it all will be different. You’ll find out because you’ll be there, too.”
“No,” Stuart said. “When I die I’m dead; I don’t have a soul.”
“You, too,” the phoce said, and he seemed to be gloating; his voice had a malicious, cruel tinge of relish. “I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” the phoce said, “one time I saw you.”
Frightened in spite of himself, Stuart said, “Aw—”
“One time,” the phoce insisted, more firmly now. “It was you; no doubt about it. Want to know what you were doing?”
“Naw.”
“You were eating a dead rat raw.”
Stuart said nothing, but he pushed the cart faster and faster, down the sidewalk as fast as he could go, back to the store.
When they got back to the store they found the crowd of people still in front of the TV set. And the rocket had been fired off; it had just left the ground, and it was not known yet if the stages had performed properly.
Hoppy wheeled himself back downstairs to the repair department and Stuart remained upstairs before the set. But the phoce’s words had upset him so much that he could not concentrate on the TV screen; he wandered off, and then, seeing Fergesson in the upstairs office, walked that way.
At the office desk, Fergesson sat going over a pile of contracts and charge tags. Stuart approached him “Listen. That goddam Hoppy—”
Fergesson glanced up from his tags.
“Forget it,” Stuart said, feeling discouraged.
“I watched him work,” Fergesson said. “I went downstairs and watched him when he didn’t know I was. I agree there’s something unsavory about it. But he’s competent; I looked at what he’d done, and it was done right, and that’s all that counts.” He scowled at Stuart.
“I said forget it,” Stuart said.
“Did they fire the rocket off?”
“Just now.”
“We haven’t moved a single item today, because of that circus,” Fergesson said.
“Circus!” He seated himself in the chair opposite Fergesson, in such a manner that he could watch the floor below them. “It’s history!”
“It’s a way of you guys standing around doing nothing.” Once more Fergesson sorted through the tags.
“Listen, I’ll tell you what Hoppy did.” Stuart leaned toward him. “Up at the café
, at Fred’s Fine Foods.”
Fergesson eyed him, pausing in his work.
“He had a fit,” Stuart said. “He went nuts.”
“No kidding.” Fergesson looked displeased.
“He passed out because—he had a beer. And he saw beyond the grave. He saw me eating a dead rat. And it was raw. So he said.”
Fergesson laughed.
“It’s not funny.”
“Sure it is. He’s razzing you back for all the razzing you dish out and you’re so dumb you get taken in.”
“He really saw it,” Stuart said stubbornly.
“Did he see me?”
“He didn’t say. He does that up there all the time; they give him beers and he goes into his trance and they ask questions. About what it’s like. I just happened to be there, eating lunch. I didn’t even see him leave the store; I didn’t know he would be there.”
For a moment Fergesson sat frowning and pondering, and then he reached out and pressed the button of the intercom which connected the office with the repair department. “Hoppy, wheel up here to the office; I want to talk to you.”
“It wasn’t my intention to get him into trouble,” Stuart said.
“Sure it was,” Fergesson said. “But I still ought to know; I’ve got a right to know what my employees are doing when they’re in a public place acting in a fashion that might throw discredit on the store.”
They waited, and after a time they heard the labored sound of the cart rolling up the stairs to the office.
As soon as he appeared, Hoppy said, “What I do on my lunch hour is my own business, Mr. Fergesson. That’s how I feel.”
“You’re wrong,” Fergesson said. “It’s my business, too. Did you see me beyond the grave, like you did Stuart? What was I doing? I want to know, and you better give me a good answer or you’re through here, the same day you were hired.”
The phoce, in a low, steady voice, said, “I didn’t see you, Mr. Fergesson, because your soul perished and won’t be reborn.”
For a while Fergesson studied the phoce. “Why is that?” he asked finally.
“It’s your fate,” Hoppy said.
“I haven’t done anything criminal or immoral.”
The phoce said, “It’s the cosmic process, Mr. Fergesson. Don’t blame me.” He became silent, then.
Turning to Stuart, Fergesson said, “Christ. Well, ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.” Returning to the phoce he said, “Did you see anybody else I know, like my wife? No, you never met my wife. What about Lightheiser? What’s going to become of him?”
“I didn’t see him,” the phoce said.
Fergesson said, “How did you fix that changer? How did you really do that? It looked like—you healed it. It looked like instead of replacing that broken spring you made the spring whole again. How did you do that? Is that one of those extra-sensory powers or whatever they are?”
“I repaired it,” the phoce said in a stony voice.
To Stuart, Fergesson said, “He won’t say. But I saw him. He was concentrating on it in some peculiar way. Maybe you were right, McConchie; maybe it was a mistake to hire him. Still, it’s the results that count. Listen, Hoppy, I don’t want you messing around with trances out in public anywhere along this street now that you’re working for me; that was okay before, but not now. Have your trances in the privacy of your own home, is that clear?” He once more picked up his stack of tags. “That’s all. Both you guys, go down and do some work instead of standing around.”
The phoce at once spun his cart around and wheeled off, toward the stairs. Stuart, his hands in his pockets, slowly followed.
When he got downstairs and back to the TV set and the people standing around it he heard the announcer say excitedly that the first three stages of the rocket appeared to have fired successfully.
That’s good news, Stuart thought. A bright chapter in the history of the human race. He felt a little better, now, and he parked himself by the counter, where he could obtain a good view of the screen.
Why would I eat a dead rat? he asked himself. It must be a terrible world, the next reincarnation, to live like that. Not even to cook it but just to snatch it up and gobble it down. Maybe, he thought, even fur and all; fur and tail, everything. He shuddered.
How can I watch history being made? he wondered angrily. When I have to think about things like dead rats—I want to fully meditate on this great spectacle unfolding before my very eyes, and instead—I have to have garbage like that put into my mind by that sadistic, that radiation-drug freak that Fergesson had to go and hire. Sheoot!
He thought of Hoppy, then, no longer bound to his cart, no longer an armless, legless cripple, but somehow floating. Somehow master of them all, of—as Hoppy had said—the world. And that thought was even worse than the one about the rat.
I’ll bet there’s plenty he saw, Stuart said to himself, that he isn’t going to say, that he’s deliberately keeping back. He just tells us enough to make us squirm and then he shuts up. If he can go into a trance and see the next reincarnation then he can see everything because what else is there? But I don’t believe in that Eastern stuff anyhow, he said to himself. I mean, that isn’t Christian.
But he believed what Hoppy had said; he believed because he had seen with his own eyes. There really was a trance. That much was true.
Hoppy had seen something. And it was a dreadful something; there was no doubt of that.
What else does he see? Stuart wondered. I wish I could make the little bastard say. What else has that warped, wicked mind perceived about me and about the rest of us, all of us?
I wish, he thought, I could look, too. Because it seemed to Stuart very important, and he ceased looking at the TV screen. He forgot about Walter and Lydia Dangerfield and history in the making; he thought only about Hoppy and the incident at the café. He wished he could stop thinking about it but he could not.
He thought on and on.
IV
The far-off popping noise made Mr. Austurias turn his head to see what was coming along the road. Standing on the hillside at the edge of the grove of live oaks, he shielded his eyes and saw on the road below the small phocomobile of Hoppy Harrington; in the center of his cart the phocomelus guided himself along, picking a way past the potholes. But the popping noise had not been made by the phocomobile, which ran from an electric battery.
A truck, Mr. Austurias realized. One of Orio Stroud’s converted old wood-burners; he saw it now, and it moved at great speed, bearing down on Hoppy’s phocomobile. The phocomelus did not seem to hear the big vehicle behind him.
The road belonged to Orio Stroud; he had purchased it from the county the year before, and it was up to him to maintain it and also to allow traffic to move along it other than his own trucks, He was not permitted to charge a toll. And yet, despite the agreement, the pod-burning truck clearly meant to sweep the phocomobile from its path; it headed straight without slowing.
God, Mr. Austurias thought. He involuntarily raised his hand, as if warding off the truck. Now it was almost upon the cart, and still Hoppy paid no heed.
“Hoppy!” Mr. Austurias yelled, and his voice echoed in the afternoon quiet of the woods, his voice and the poppopping of the truck’s engine.
The phocomelus glanced up, did not see him, continued on with the truck now so close that—Mr. Austurias shut his eyes. When he opened them again he saw the phocomobile off onto the shoulder of the road; the truck roared on, and Hoppy was safe: he had gotten out of the way at the last moment.
Grinning after the truck, Hoppy waved an extensor. It had not bothered him, not frightened him in the least, although he must have known that the truck intended to grind him flat. Hoppy turned, waved at Mr. Austurias, who he could not see but who he knew to be there.
His hands trembled, the hands of the grade school teacher; he bent, picked up his empty basket, stepped up the hillside toward the first old oak tree with its damp shadows beneath. Mr. Austurias was out picking mushrooms. He turned
his back on the road and went up, into the gloom, knowing that Hoppy was safe, and so he could forget him and what he had just now seen; his attention returned swiftly to the image of great orange Cantharellus cibarius, the chanterelle mushrooms.
Yes, the color glowed, a circle in the midst of the black humus, the pulpy, spirited flower very low, almost buried in the rotting leaves. Mr. Austurias could taste it already; it was big and fresh, this chanterelle; the recent rains had called it out. Bending, he broke its stalk far down, so as to get all there was for his basket. One more and he had his evening meal. Crouching, he looked in every direction, not moving.
Another, less bright, perhaps older … he rose, started softly toward it, as if it might escape or he might somehow lose it. Nothing tasted as good as the chanterelle to him, not even the fine shaggy manes. He knew the locations of many stands of chanterelles here and there in West Marin County, on the oak-covered hillsides, in the woods. In all, he gathered eight varieties of forest and pasture mushrooms; he had been almost that many years learning where to expect them, and it was well worth it. Most people feared mushrooms, especially since the Emergency; they feared the new, mutant ones above all, because there the books could not help them.
For instance, Mr. Austurias thought, the one he now broke … wasn’t the color a little off? Turning it over he inspected the veins. Perhaps a pseudo-chanterelle, not seen before in this region, toxic or even fatal, a mutation. He sniffed it, catching the scent of mould.
Should I be afraid to eat this fellow? he asked himself. If the phocomelus can calmly face his danger, I should be able to face mine.
He put the chanterelle in his basket and walked on.
From below, from the road, he heard a strange sound, a grating, rough noise; pausing, he listened. The noise came again, and Mr. Austhrias strode quickly back the way he had come until he emerged from the oaks and once more stood above the road.
The phocomobile was still pulled off onto the shoulder; it had not gone on, and in it sat the armless, legless handyman, bent over. What was he doing? A convulsion jerked Hoppy about, lifting his head, and Mr. Austurias saw to his amazement that the phocomelus was crying.