The jacket had been worn almost every day for a year, and was fraying, and the old woman was dead. He tried not to think about that. He went across the lobby to the kind darkness of the auditorium, with occasional snatched glances at the advertisements on the wall. Next week’s show—the same as this, held over by public demand.
Consequently, with the house lights up and minutes still to go before the start of the program, there were many people to stare at him over popcorn-full mouths as he went down toward the base of the gigantic screen. He tried not to be aware of that, either.
The center front rows were all full of teen-age kids. He turned down a side aisle and went to an unoccupied end seat; the view of the screen would be badly angled, but it was that or a tedious business of stumbling over other people’s feet, maybe treading on toes with his dragging shorter leg. He sat down and looked at the blank screen, his mind filling as always with fantasy images. The mere environment of the theater seemed to take him out of himself, even before the movie started. Snatches of conversation, pictures, moods of elation and depression, all flickered past his atttention, and brought a sense of taut excitement. Some of the material in this mental variety show could startle him with its unfamiliarity, but he had always assumed it was due to his surroundings provoking a recurrence of otherwise forgotten memory. He had seen hundreds of movies here; they must be the source of the ideas crowding his mind.
And yet … that wasn’t too satisfying as an explanation, somehow.
A man in brown came striding down the main aisle, all the way to the front, turned sharply toward the side where Howson sat, took the seat diagonally in front of him, and threw an overcoat across the seat adjacent. He shrugged aside his sleeve and stared at his watch before leaning back and turning his head toward the screen.
That, or the fact that he was well-dressed, and should by appearance have been in the expensive seats, or something not available to consciousness, attracted Howson’s attention to him. For no definable reason, he was sure the man in brown hadn’t consulted his watch simply to know how much time remained before show time. The man was not … not exactly nervous, but on edge about something, and it wasn’t the prospect of a good movie.
His puzzlement was cut short by the darkening of the auditorium, and he forgot everything except the huge colored images parading across the screen. By night and day his dreams were populated from movies, TV and magazines; he preferred movies because his fellow watchers didn’t care about his presence, and although people were willing enough to let him sit and see their TV, there was always that tense awkwardness.
Besides, with every breath he seemed to draw in the enjoyment of the rest of the audience, adding it to his own.
First, a travelogue, Playgrounds of the Planet. The crashing music of surf at Bondi Beach, the humming roar of turbine cars as they streaked down the Sahara Highway, the whish and whir of skis on an Alpine slope and then the yammer of pulse-jet skimmers on blue Pacific water. Howson shut his ears to the syrupy wisecracking commentator. He made his own commentary, as though he could shift personalities like shifting gears, choosing a hard-boiled masculine frame of mind for admiring the next-to-nude girls at Bondi, a worried near-feminine attitude for the ski-jumpers—thoughts of pain on failure, bruises, broken bones. … He shied away from the recollection of a tree he had fallen out of.
So all through. But the cars lingered longest. To be on the Sahara Highway, knife-cut-straight for two hundred miles at a stretch, where there was no limping; the photo-reactive glass of the roof automatically darkened against the harsh sun, the counter of the turbine steady at its two hundred thousand revs, the gangs of dark-skinned men at work with the sand-sweeps, one every ten miles, the glimpses of artificial oases islanded by sand, where with water and tough grass and mutated conifers men struggled to reclaim once-fertile land—that was a dream to cherish.
Advertisements. Coming attractions. His mind wandered, and his attention centered briefly on the man in brown, who was checking his watch again and gazing around as though expecting someone. Girl friend? Somehow not. Howson let the problem slide as the main titles of the big feature sprang into red life on the screen.
Howson knew little about his father; he had learned tact early because it was the complement, as it were, of the treatment he received at school, so scraps of information put together had to take the place of direct questioning of his mother. He still knew scarcely anything about the political crisis that had gestated along with him, and its worst after effects were over by the time he became aware of such things as news and international affairs.
Even so, he sensed something special about movies of this kind. He couldn’t analyze what led to the reaction of audiences watching them, but he knew he liked the feeling; everyone seemed to be cautiously self-conscious, as though he were testing out a leg fresh from surgical splints, and establishing by the absence of expected pain that it would take his full weight.
In a way, that parallel was exact. The trauma of the “crisis” had subsided to such a degree that it would soon be possible to teach children about it, treating it as history. Experience had persuaded those who recalled it clearly that it wasn’t the end of everything: here was life going on, and the country was prosperous, and children were growing up happy, and worry had proved needless.
So now the movie theaters were full when there was a picture like this one playing—and there were lots like this one, and Howson had seen several. Absurd, spectacular, violent, melodramatic, they always centered on terrorism or war-prevention in some colorful corner of the world, and their heroes were the mysterious, half-understood agents of the UN who read minds—the honorable spies, the telepathists.
Here now the story was a romance. Clean-cut, tall, good-looking mind-reading agent encounters blond, tall, beautiful, sadly misled mind-reading girl maintained under hypnosis by fanatical group bent on blowing up a nuclear-power station in the furtherance of their greed for conquest. The older members of the audience squirmed a little under the impact of too-familiar images: olive-green trucks thundering down a moonlit road, soldiers deploying unhurriedly around the main intersections of a big city, an abandoned child weeping as it wandered through silent alleys.
There were obvious attempts to parallel reality at certain points, but not many. There was, for instance, a motherly Jewish woman telepathist intended to resemble the legendary Ilse Kronstadt; in the front rows of the audience, teenage girls who had let their boys’ hands wander too intimately across their breasts squirmed under the horrible but delicious idea that real mothers should read this memory from them later—horrible for the expected row to follow, delicious for the hope that parents were indeed ultimately dependable.
And the boys wondered about being telepathic, and thought of knowing for sure whether the girls would or wouldn’t—and power, and money.
Meantime, Howson. It didn’t seem to him especially insightful to realize that it couldn’t actually happen this way; for him, this fictionalization was on the same footing as a camera trick, something to be taken on its own terms, with its own artificial logic. His fantasies and his real environment were too unalike to become confused in his mind.
His genetic handicap had at least spared him any obsession with sexuality, and he was diffusely grateful that he had no intolerable yearnings which his appearance would bar from fulfillment. But he did hunger for acceptance, and made the most of such crumbs of conversation as were thrown to him.
Accordingly he thought about these telepathists from a different standpoint: as persons set apart by a mental, rather than a physical, abnormality. He was sufficiently cynical to have realized that the admiration for telepathists provoked by this movie, by others like it, by official news stories, was artificial. Telepathists were elsewhere people, remote, wonderful, like snow on distant mountains. The thought of being able to pry secrets from other people’s minds appealed to this audience around him, no matter how carefully the dialogue and action skirted the point, the instant the c
orollary presented itself—the idea of having your mind invaded—there was a violent revulsion. The ambivalence was omnipresent: consciously one could know that telepathists were saving life, saving sanity, guiding countries (like this one) away from war—and yet it made no difference to the instinctual alarm.
Their existence had been eased into public consciousness with shoehorn care: rumors purposely allowed to run wild to the point of absurdity had been deflated by calm official announcements rendered believable by sheer contrast; quiet ceremonies made small items for news bulletins—such-and-such a telepathist working for the UN was today decorated with the highest order of such-and-such a country recently saved from civil war. For the real people behind the public image one might hunt indefinitely, and end up with no more than a few names, a few blurred photographs, and some inexact second-hand information.
There was a policy behind even such far-out melodrama as this movie, Howson was sure. And for that reason, he was envious. He knew beyond doubt that the uncushioned impact of their abnormality on ordinary people would have culminated in persecution, maybe pogroms. But because the telepathists were important, the impact was cushioned—the world’s resources were marshalled to help them.
He felt achingly the desire to be at least a little important, so that his deformity—no more extraordinary than a telepathist’s mental peculiarities—would seem less catastrophic.
His mind wandered from the screen and was caught by the man in brown, who was no longer alone. His head was bent toward another man, who had sat down, without Howson realizing it, in the seat over which the man in brown had first thrown his topcoat. Searching back in memory, Howson realized he had seen the door of the men’s room swing twice within the past few minutes.
He listened out of curiosity, and was suddenly sweating. He caught mumbled phrases, and pieced the rest together.
“Boat on the river … two a.m. at Black Wharf … Cudgels has a personal stake in this lot … worth a good half-million, I’d say … little diversion for The Snake, keep his men busy other side of town … no problem with fuzz, bought the sergeant off …”
The men grinned at each other. The latecomer got up and went back into the men’s room; before he returned and headed to his former seat elsewhere in the theater, the man in brown had put his topcoat over his arm and headed for the exit. Howson sat frozen, the chance of being important handed to him at the very moment when he was wishing for it.
Cudgels … The Snake: yes, it was certain. He’d never mixed in such business, but you couldn’t live in this broken-down quarter of the city without hearing those names occasionally and learning that they were gang bosses and rivals. A club would be smashed up, a store’s biggest plate-glass window broken, a young tough carried to the hospital from an alley lined with garbage cans and floored with his blood. Then one heard mention of Cudgels Lister and Horace “Snake” Hampton. Also a car would be pointed out by a knowing youth: “The smart way to the top; I’m going that way one day!”
Painfully, to the accompaniment of hard breathing, Howson forced himself to the crucial decision.
v
The street was still called Grand Avenue, but it had been one of the focal points of the crisis period. Afterwards people shied away from it, beginning the decline which had now reduced the side streets nearby to a status barely above slums. Even so, it was well lighted, and the garish stores had glaring windows, and Howson would normally have avoided it. He preferred the darker side of any street, and night to day.
Now, heart hammering, he braved it. There was a place at the far end—a club and bar—which served as the Snake’s front for tax and other purposes. It was no use trying to make his ill-formed face look severe for the menacing encounter he was bound to; a mirror on the door of a barber’s told him that as he passed. The best he could hope to do would be to look … well … casual.
The hell. It was what he had to say that mattered.
He hobbled clear past his destination the first time, because his mouth was so dry and his guts were so tense. He stopped a few yards farther on, and deliberately evened his breathing until he had some semblance of control. Then he plunged.
The bar was chromed, mirrored, neoned. Music blasted from speakers high on the wall. At tables early drinkers were grouped in twos and threes, but there was no one at the bar yet. A bored bartender leaned on his elbows and eyed the short stranger with the limp.
He said, “What’ll it be?”
Howson didn’t drink, had never tried alcohol. He’d seen shambling drunks and wondered why the hell anyone gifted with ordinary physical control should want to throw it away. The thought of being even more uncoordinated filled him with disgust. In any case, he had no spare money.
He said, “Is … uh … Mr. Hampton here?”
The bartender took his elbows off the counter. He said, “What’s that to you, Crooky? He’s not for public show!”
“I have something he’ll want to hear,” Howson said, mentally cursing the reedy pipe which had to serve him for a voice.
“He knows everything he wants to know,” the bartender said curtly. “There’s the door. Use it.”
He picked up a damp cloth and began to swab beer rings off the bar.
Howson looked around and licked his lips. The customers had decided not to stare at him any more. Encouraged, he went the sidewise pace necessary to confront the bartender again.
“It’s about some business of Cudgels’,” he whispered. His whisper was better than his ordinary voice—less distinctive.
“Since when did Cudgels tell you his stories?” the bartender said sourly. But he thought it over, and after a pause gave a shrug. Reaching under the bar, he seemed to grope for something—a buzzer, maybe. Shortly, a door behind the bar opened and a man with oily black hair appeared.
“Crooky here,” the barman said. “Wants to sell news about Cudgels to Mr. Hampton.”
The oily-haired man stared unbelievingly at Howson. Then he too shrugged, gestured; the flap of the bar was raised for Howson to limp through.
In back was the stockroom of the bar. Oily-hair escorted Howson through here, through a door lined with red baize, down a badly lighted corridor to a similar door. And beyond that, sat him down in a room furnished with four identical red velvet lounges, decorated with gilt pillars and pretty abstract paintings.
“Wait,” Oily-hair said curtly, and went out.
Howson sat, very tense, on the edge of the velvet cushions, eyes roving as he tried to figure out what went on back here. He fancied he caught a clicking noise, and recalled a shot from a favorite movie. Roulette. The air smelled of anxiety, and that would be why.
Soon Oily-hair returned, beckoned him, and this time took him into a businesslike office where a lean man with pale hands presided behind a telephone-laden desk, tall youths like guards at either side of him. At Howson’s entrance the looks on their faces changed; they had been wary, and became astonished.
Looking at the man behind the desk, Howson could see why he was called The Snake. His mere presence was devious; cunning lighted the dark irises of his eyes.
He studied Howson for a long moment, then lifted an eyebrow in wordless inquiry to Oily-hair.
“Crooky here wants to sell information about Cudgels,” was the condensed explanation. “That’s all I know.”
“Hmmm …” The Snake rubbed his smooth chin. “And walks in unannounced. Interesting. Who are you, Crooky?”
It didn’t seem to be as unkindly meant as it usually was; it was simply a label. Maybe a man who was called The Snake was casual about such things. Howson cleared his throat.
“My name’s Gerry Howson,” he said. “I was down the movie theater an hour back. There was this guy waiting for someone to move to the next seat while the picture was playing. They whispered together, and I overheard them.”
“Uh-huh,” The Snake commented. “So-o-o?”
“This is where we get to the price,” Oily-hair suggested.
“Shut up,
Collar,” The Snake said. He kept his eyes on Howson.
“A boat’s coming upriver to Black Wharf at two a.m. I don’t know for sure it’s tonight, but I think so. It has half a million worth of stuff on it.”
Howson waited, thinking belatedly that Collar was probably right—he should have named a price, at least, or fed the news by stages. Then he caught himself. No, he’d done it the right way. There was total silence. And it was lasting.
“So that’s how he does it,” The Snake said finally. “Hear that, Collar? Well, if you heard it, what are you doing standing there?”
Collar gulped audibly and snatched at one of the phones on the desk. There was another silence, during which the two guards stared with interest at Howson.
“Gizmo?” Collar said in a low voice to the phone. “Collar. You can talk? … General call. We have some night work … Yes, OK. Not more than two hours. Smooth!”
He cradled the phone. The Snake was getting to his feet. The process appeared to be complete. Howson felt a stab of panic at its speed. He said, “Uh, I guess it’s worth something, isn’t it?”
“Possibly.” The Snake gave him a sleepy smile. “We’ll know soon enough, won’t we? Right now what it’s worth is—oh, let’s say a few drinks, a square meal, which you look like you could do with, and some company. Hear me, Lots?”
One of the youthful guards nodded and stepped forward.
“Look after him. He may be valuable, he may not: we’ll see. Dingus!”
The other guard responded.
“He says his name is Gerry Howson. Get his address off him. Go down around where he lives and put some questions. Don’t take more than a couple of hours over it. If you get the slightest smell—if anyone says he’s even been seen on the same bus with one of Cudgels’ boys—blow in and warn me. And sound out the fuzz on your way if you can find one of our friends on duty at headquarters.”