Kane breathed deeply, put a hand on the doorknob. Then suddenly whipped around as he heard a sound of ripping fabric, felt a dancing across his trousers. Confronting him was Fairbanks, poised like Scaramouche. He had slashed an “F” into Kane’s buttocks.
Fairbanks sneered at Kane contemptuously. “There, no sniveling! You’re not hurt! I just shot the gun from your hand, vile dog!”
Fromme irrupted before them, bawling, “Get this man into surgery, dammit! He’s bleeding to death! Don’t you care? Judas priest, doesn’t anyone care!”
Kane stood frozen, his eyes fixed on Fairbanks, who was dancing around him and feinting with his sword, snarling, “Defend yourself, you churl!” Bemish dropped the hammer on Groper.
Kane suddenly turned and went into his office, slamming the door shut behind him as he moved toward his desk. He clutched at his temples, for a moment stood rigid. Then, swift as a spasm, he reached to his desk, picked up a Los Angeles telephone directory and ripped it savagely, smoothly and effortlessly into two very neatly edged halves; he flung them both against a wall.
“Great God!”
Kane whirled. Leslie Spoor stood gaping in shock. Kane said nothing, felt at his head. Spoor took a step, picked up a phone book half, eyed it numbly and then looked at Kane. “Was that you, ‘Little Flower’?” he breathed. Then he bolted from the room, bawling, “Manfred! Mighty Manfred!”
Kane was a man who had looked on Medusa; eyes wide and staring and yet unseeing. The jagged pulse in his cheek where once the scar had been glowed white.
Chapter 8
“The man has a devil,” brooded Cutshaw, sprawled on a cot in the inmates’ dorm.
“Ta! He is harmless,” responded Corfu, breathing heavily, adenoidally, over a chessboard opposite Nammack on the cot adjoining Cutshaw’s. Lieutenant Nammack, a former navigator, was wearing his coonskin cap. The tip of the tail was touching the board as his head bent low in ponder.
“Don’t be a child,” Cutshaw retorted. “Kane is fox, an absolute fox. Look at his eyes. Don’t you get any message?”
“Check!” said Corfu.
Cutshaw eyed him severely. “How very like you, Master Corfu. You have eyes but will not see; ears, but will not listen.”
“Shit!” breathed Nammack.
“What?” demanded Cutshaw.
“He has me in check.”
Cutshaw reached out a foot and irritably swept away the chess pieces. “Splendid,” said the astronaut. “Your leader speaks of doom and you speak of check. Dummies, Kane has us in check.”
“I think him harmless,” repeated Corfu eying the shambles of his conquest.
“What was he doing,” insisted Cutshaw, “in his room for ten whole days?”
“Didn’t he say he was reading?” answered Nammack.
“Bah, humbug!” grumped Cutshaw. “He harrows me,” he fretted, “with mighty fear and wonder.” Then his eyes stared blankly at nothing as he contemplated the deeps.
Spoor burst upon them, breathless.
“Mighty Manfred, I have news!”
“From the ‘Twilight Zone’?” asked Cutshaw.
Corfu and Nammack started a game.
“I speak of Kane!” declared Spoor.
“What about him?” prodded Cutshaw.
“Listen, none of him is him?”
Too weary to walk away, Cutshaw turned his back on Spoor, sighing, “Sure, baby, sure.”
Spoor seized Cutshaw’s foot, twisting the astronaut around to him. “Gregory Peck in Spellbound! Remember? Remember? Supposed to be a psychiatrist, takes charge of a nut house but all the time he’s crazy and not a doctor at all?!”
“Hmm.”
“Same thing with Kane! Wait’ll you hear! Wait’ll you hear! I mean, just like the movie! Just exactly Gregory Peck!”
Spoor’s dog licked Cutshaw’s hand with a bubbly, liquid razor.
“I take a fork in my hand, see, a fork in my hand! On a tablecloth make ski tracks and then Kane looks down and faints!” Spoor leaped over to Nammack. “Understand me? Faints!”
Nammack lifted his head to him, his nose but an inch from Spoor’s, and as he spoke his voice grew in volume as the theme overmastered him. “You’re a very sick man, Spoor, you know that, baby, don’t you? Now get out of my life, kid! Who needs your kind of illness! Get some help, professional help!”
“Do not mock,” Spoor uttered softly, whereupon Nammack tweaked his nose. Spoor emitted a yelp and leaped up from the cot. “So! I come to you with goodies and you answer me with farts! That is what comes of casting Fritos among the apes! But no more! Why should I tell you about the phone book Colonel Kane ripped in half! Come, Rip Torn!” With a haughty, careless grace, Spoor tossed the neatly ripped half of the phone book onto the chessboard, and flounced imperiously away.
Cutshaw turned over, eying the telephone book, then called out, “Spoor! Spoor! Hey, wait!”
“From here to eternity!” answered Spoor, turning around by the door.
“Did you see Kane rip it in half?”
“I have seen what I have seen! I have spake! Pox on your kidney!” fumed Spoor. Then he turned again and left them.
Corfu’s eyes met Cutshaw’s. “Didn’t you say he knew nothing about Rorschachs?”
“I said he pretended he didn’t know.”
“What are you thinking?” Nammack asked Cutshaw.
“That we are all in ‘rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones.’”
“What?”
“T. S. Eliot. I shall board the monster presently.”
“T. S. Eliot?” puzzled Nammack.
“Gregory Peck,” murmured Cutshaw.
Kane was dozing at his desk when the door slam awakened him. He jerked up his head, saw Manfred Cutshaw turning the lock, and grinning evilly. “Spoor has told me everything, you mad, wicked boy!”
“What are you talking about?” said Kane.
Cutshaw whipped out a pen and extended it to Kane as he pressed a document flat on the desk top. “Enough of this pretense!” he crackled. “Here! Sign this confession, Hud! Or Greg! Or Tab! Or whoever you happen to be!”
“What in the devil do you mean?”
“I mean none of you is you!”
The crash of a hammer was heard from afar, chased by the ghosts of falling plaster. Kane’s glance flicked down to the document. Then up again at Cutshaw. “This is blank.”
“Of course it’s blank. We aren’t certain who you are yet. Merely sign and we’ll fill it in later.”
“Cutshaw, just for the sake of humoring you—”
“Sign ‘Great Impostor’! Plead the mercy of the court. Kangaroos can be kind. Kangaroos are not all bad.”
“Tell me—who do you think I am?”
“I must be frank,” said the astronaut, his eyelids narrowed to slits. “There are some who believe that Hitler is still alive. The lunatic fringe, of course.”
Again the blow of a hammer. And now the running of feet.
“And what do you think?” asked the Colonel.
“I’m not thinking. Not at all. I am merely taking a poll. The decision of the judges, Hud, is absolutely final.” Cutshaw again extended the pen. “Make your ‘X’… neatness counts.”
Kane smiled at him coldly, whereupon Cutshaw retracted the pen and took a haughty step backward. “Proud ox! Is that your answer? Very well!” He swooped to the door. “We’ll send you cigarettes and cookies every month, Colonel Bogey! Addressed, incidentally, to ‘Occupant, Cell 108’!” He turned the lock, swung wide the door, revealing Groper beaming with triumph, Bemish’s hammer held high in his hand.
“Got it!” Groper exulted.
“Marvey!” commented Cutshaw. Then he pointed to the Captain. “Look, look, Hud! See the idiot captain! See the pretty hammer! See the idiot captain as he swings the pretty hammer?”
“Cutshaw!” hissed Groper.
“Kane, we are watching!” warned the astronaut grimly. Then he oozed out of sight.
“Watching
what?” asked Groper.
Kane looked blank, did not answer. He merely stared at Groper fixedly. The Captain looked at the hammer, feeling sheepish and oddly uncomfortable. “Got the hammer,” he mumbled inanely, and thought: Groper, you’re okay. He tossed a salute and left the office, despising the fear that he felt in Kane’s presence.
Kane looked down at the blank “confession” form that Cutshaw had placed on his desk. He picked it up and turned it over. And blinked at the fragment of verse that he found scrawled on the back of the page:
For what to Werner von Braun is
This quintessence of dust?
“The sun, mother; give me the sun.”
Alas, poor Hamlet, he is mad.
But we’ll give him Manhattan,
The Bronx and Staten Island, too,
For here the men are as mad as he.
Star light,
Star bright,
First star nobody sees:
Not anymore.
Not tonight.
Merry Christmas, Auntie Sanger,
Merry Christmas.
Your troubles are nought.
Twinkle
Twinkle
Little
BLAST!
See the mushroom, Auntie Sanger?
See the funny white mushroom?
Old Geiger counters
A few dismembered arms and
A torn and faded print of the Mona Lisa
Hurtle breathtakingly out beyond the reaches
Of Isaac Newton, becoming stars in a
Miniature universe:
The revolving, orbital ghost of all
Christmases past
And not to be.
“Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you”:
A tight-lipped
Thin-lipped
Unsmiling smile
Alone in the void:
Not one now to mock your own spinning?
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me!
Midnight never come.
And there it ended. Kane read it again, placing the literary allusions; they convinced him the poem was Cutshaw’s. Had he intended that Kane read it? “The sun, mother; give me the sun.” Wasn’t that the line by which the boy in Ibsen’s Ghosts disclosed to his mother that he was mad? He couldn’t remember. He read the poem again. And thought it more likely that one of the fail-safe crewmen had written it. Then realized with a start that he could have written it himself.
Cutshaw returned, slamming the door. “Now I know who you are,” he grimly announced.
“Who?”
“An unfrocked priest!” Cutshaw then took a flying leap at the sofa, sprawled on his back and clutched at his medal. “I want you to hear my confession.”
“I’m not a priest,” said Kane.
“Hah! Also you’re not an orange. Colonel No-Face, who the hell are you? All this suspense is a pain in the ass.”
“I am Colonel Hudson Kane.”
“You are Gregory Peck, you idiot. Don’t let anyone talk you out of it. No one could ever talk me out of it. Not on your life. No, sir. I’d be glad to be Adolphe Menjou. Have I told you about my uncle? Played piano on a mountaintop, naked as a jaybird. Did it almost every morning, Hud, usually at sunrise.”
“Yes, go on,” said Kane.
“That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“About my uncle, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Hell, isn’t that enough? What more do you want?”
“Nothing at all. I merely wondered why you mentioned it.”
“I mentioned it, you cluck, because Adolphe Menjou wouldn’t do that. And neither would Warren Beatty. I would love to be Warren Beatty.”
“Well, I really don’t see why,” said Kane.
“Of course you don’t see why! You’re Gregory Peck!”
“Yes, yes, I see.”
“Don’t go putting me on, you patronizing snot. You’re not Gregory Peck at all. You’re an unfrocked priest. Incidentally, old padre, I’ve got some rather disquieting news for you.”
“What? What news?”
“I can prove there is a Foot. Would you like me to do it now or would you prefer to wire the Pope before I talk to United Press? Once that happens, Hud, I warn you, there won’t be frocks to go around. Better put yours on now so they’ll think you’re sincere.”
“Let’s hear the proof.”
“Put on the frock. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“I haven’t got a frock.”
“Where the hell is it?” demanded Cutshaw. “Walking around at some witches’ sabbath?”
“No.”
“Hud—put on the frock.”
“The proof.”
“You crazy, stubborn kid, Hud. Don’t come sniveling to me later when you can’t get a job cleaning altars.” Cutshaw sat up. “Have you ever heard of ‘entropy’?”
“I have.”
“Say it’s a racehorse and I’ll maim you!”
“It is related,” said Kane, “to a law of thermodynamics.”
“Pretty slick there, Hud. Maybe too slick for your own damn good. Now where am I heading?” demanded Cutshaw.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“To where the universe is heading! To a final, final heat death! Know what that is? Well, I’ll tell you. I am Morris the Explainer. It’s a basic foos of physics, an irreversible, basic foos that one of these days, bye and bye, the whole damn party will be over. In about three billion years every particle of matter in the entire bloody universe will be totally disorganized. Random, totally random. And once the universe is random it’ll maintain a certain temperature, a certain constant temperature that never, never changes. And because it never changes the particles of matter in the universe can never hope to reorganize. The universe can’t build up again. Random, it’ll always stay random. Forever and ever and ever. Doesn’t that scare the living piss out of you, Hud? Hud, where’s your frock? Got a spare? Let me have it. I shouldn’t talk like this in front of me. I swear, it gives me the willies.”
As Cutshaw spoke, he stared at the ground, like a man who is talking to himself.
“Please continue,” said Colonel Kane.
“Do you accept my foos of physics?”
“Theories keep changing every year,” said Kane. “But this one seems immutable. At least, the physicists seem to think so.”
“Does that mean ‘yes,’ you devious asp?”
“Yes.”
“You accept my basic foos?”
“Yes, I accept it.”
Cutshaw scowled, looking up. “Don’t say ‘it,’ you swine, say ‘foos.’ Say, ‘I accept your basic foos.’”
Kane gripped a pencil under the desk and broke it in half. Then looked at his hands. “I accept your basic foos.”
“Marvey keen! Now follow, Youngblood, follow. Follow very, very carefully.” Cutshaw’s speech became slow and measured. “It’s a matter of time before it happens, before we reach that final heat death. And when we reach that final heat death, life can never reappear. If that seems clear, Hud, paw the ground twice.”
“Yes, that’s clear.”
“Your lightning insights purely astound me. Now, let’s take a simple disjunction. Either matter—matter or energy—is eternal and always existed, or it didn’t always exist and had a definite beginning in time. So let’s eliminate one or the other. Let’s say that matter always existed. And bear in mind that the coming heat death, Hud, is purely a matter of time. Did I say three billion years? Let’s say a billion billion years. I don’t care what the time required is, Hud. Whatever it is, it’s limited. But if matter always existed, dunce, you and I aren’t here.”
“What?”
“Hud, we don’t exist! Heat death has already come and gone!”
“I don’t follow.”
“You’d rather confess. Give me the frock and I’ll let you confess. Let no one write ‘Obdurate’ on my tombstone. Call me flexible, Hud, and confess
.”
“Captain—”
“Warren, then. Call me Warren.”
“I’ve missed a connection,” said Kane, “in the argument.”
“You’ve been missing connections the whole of your life! Foot! You are dumber than a prize Dauphin. Look—if matter has always existed and if heat death is a matter of time like, let’s say, a billion billion years, then, Hud, it’s got to have already happened! A billion billion years have come and gone a trillion times, mon cher, an infinite number of times! Ahead of us and behind us, is an infinite number of years in the case of matter always existing! So heat death has come and gone! And once it comes, there can never be life! Never again! Not for eternity! So how come we’re talking, eh, how come? Though notice that I am talking sensibly while you just sit there drooling. Nevertheless, we are here. Why is that?”
Interest quickened in Kane’s eyes. “Either matter is not eternal, I’d say, or the entropy theory is wrong.”
“What? You reject my basic foos, Hud? My basic foos of physics?”
“No,” said Kane. “No, I do not.”
“Then there can be only one alternative, Greg: matter hasn’t always existed. And that means once there was purely nothing, Hud, nothing at all in existence. So how come there’s something now? The answer is obvious to even the lowliest, the meanest of intelligences, and that, of course, means you. The answer is something other than matter had to make matter begin to be. That something other I call Foot. How does that grab you?”
“It’s rather compelling.”
“There’s only one thing wrong,” said Cutshaw.
“What?”
“I don’t believe it for a minute. What do you take me for, a lunatic?” The astronaut sprang from the sofa, charging the desk with head-bent belligerence. “I copied that proof from a privy wall at a Maryknoll Mission in Beverly Hills!”
“It doesn’t convince you?”
“Intellectually, yes. But emotionally, no!”
Kane said, “I thought you’d made it up.”
“Hud, I am sick of your snotty insults! Sick of your whole performance, in fact! Enough of this shabby charade! Burn your frock! Buy a gown! You are Mary Baker Eddy!”
Kane said, “I thought I was Gregory Peck.”