Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (42 page)

"Now, if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."
"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"

A dismal thing to do.

I began to run up the beach, toward the bluff. I stumbled now and then
because I had had too much to drink. Far too much to drink. I heard small
shells crack under my shoes, and the sand made whipping noises.

I fell, heavily, and lay there gasping on the beach. My heart pounded in
my chest. I was too old for this sort of footwork. I hadn't had any real
exercise in years. I smoked too much and I drank too much. I did all the
wrong things. I didn't do any of the right things.

I pushed myself up a little and then I let myself down again. My heart was
pounding hard enough to frighten me. I could feel it in my chest,
frantically pumping, squeezing blood in and spurting blood out.

Like an oyster pulsing in the sea.

"Shall we be trotting home again?"

My heart was like an oyster.

I got up, fell up, and began to run again, weaving widely, my mouth open
and the air burning my throat. I was coated with sweat, streaming with it,
and it felt icy in the cold wind.

"Shall we be trotting home again?"

I rounded the bluff, and then I stopped and stood swaying, and then I
dropped to my knees.

The pure blue of the sky was unmarked by a single bird or cloud, and
nothing stirred on the whole vast stretch of the beach.

But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd,
because …

Nothing stirred, but they were there. Irene and Mandie and Carl and Horace
were there, and four others, too. Just around the bluff.

"We cannot do with more than four …"

But the Walrus and the Carpenter had taken two trips.

I began to crawl toward them on my knees. My heart, my oyster heart, was
pounding too hard to allow me to stand.

The other four had had a picnic, too, very like our own. They, too, had
plastic cups and plates, and they, too, had brought bottles. They had sat
and waited for the return of the Walrus and the Carpenter.

Irene was right in front of me. Her eyes were open and stared at, but did
not see, the sky. The pure blue uncluttered sky. There were a few grains
of sand in her left eye. Her face was almost clear of blood. There were
only a few flecks of it on her lower chin. The spray from the huge wound
in her chest seemed to have traveled mainly downward and to the right. I
stretched out my arm and touched her hand.

"Irene," I said.

But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd,
because
They'd eaten every one.

I looked up at the others. Like Irene, they were, all of them, dead. The
Walrus and the Carpenter had eaten the oysters and left the shell.

The Carpenter never found any firewood, and so they'd eaten them raw. You
can eat oysters raw if you want to.

I said her name once more, just for the record, and then I stood and
turned from them and walked to the bluff. I rounded the bluff and the
beach stretched before me, vast, smooth, empty, and remote.

Even as I ran upon it, away from them, it was remote.

The End

Author's Note:

I distrusted the
Alice
books from the start. My grown-ups tried to
pretend they were children's books and that I should and would enjoy them,
so they officially shuffled them in with the
Oz
and
Pooh
collection, but I knew better; I knew they were dangerous, and I opened
them only rarely and gingerly.

Of course Tenniel's Jabberwock leapt out at me from the start (as it has,
I am sure, at many another innocent child), but there were many other
horrors: the simultaneously fading and grinning cat; the impeccably cruel
Duchess with her "little boy"; something about Bill the Lizard floating
helplessly over the chimney; the crazed creatures at the Tea Party—the
worst part of it was the thing that pervaded all those images and all the
other images in the books (which I knew weren't about any "Wonderland" at
all, but about the very world I was trying to grow up in, only seen from
some terrifyingly sophisticated point of view); the weird convincingness
of Carroll's horrible message that
nothing, nothing
soever,
made
any sense at all!

If it hadn't been for brave, stolid Alice (bless her stout, young, British
heart), herself a child, I don't think I could have survived those goddamn
books.

But there is no Alice in this story.

© 1967 by Gahan Wilson. Originally published in
Playboy Magazine
,
May 1967.

Terry Carr

Arthur Leacock shuffled quickly down the wooden hall of the small
midwestern university where he had worked for thirty-two years and eight
months, give or take maybe a week. His sleep-rumpled, peppery hair stuck
out from under the old leather cap which he had worn for fully seventeen
of those years, and his oft-resoled shoes were almost silent in the
hallway, though its echoing properties were so good that Arthur had often
fancied he could hear his own breathing whispered back to him from the
walls.

He turned right at the large waiting room in the middle of the building
and went up the stairs to the second floor two at a time, grasping the
handrail with large-knuckled hands to pull himself along. He did not look
where he was going, but instead rested his eyes unseeingly on the stairs
passing beneath him, his mouth drawn back into the heavy wrinkles of his
cheeks.

Robert Ernsohn, full-voiced Robert with brown soul, would already be in
his office, of course. Wavy Robert, whose brow was noble as a mannequin's,
always arrived half an hour before the time he set for Arthur. When Arthur
arrived, he knew, Robert would be rechecking the figures he had pored
carefully over till midnight—not because Robert did not trust his
own abilities, but because it was his policy always to double-check his
figures. Robert, naturally, would never give in to the danger of
overconfidence, which might be called conceit; he always made sure that he
had made no mistake. And then he always smiled.

At the top of the stairs Arthur pushed through the door to the second
floor and crossed to Robert's office. The door creaked twice behind him
and then rested shut.

Robert Ernsohn looked up from his pretentiously small desk in the corner
by the window and pushed the papers aside. The red-orange sun, slipping
silently from behind the roof of the building beyond the courtyard, cast
lines of light through the venetian blinds across the desk. Brown-eyed,
brown Robert smiled with innocent satyriasis and dropped his pencil in the
pencil-glass.

"I've checked it all four times," he said. "Short of going upstate to a
computer that's all I can do. I hope it's right."

Arthur watched his mouth as he spoke and then stepped into the cloakroom
to hang up his overcoat. He found a cleaning rag and took it with him when
he came out and went on across the office, five steps, into the
laboratory. A small laboratory, cluttered and dirty. The floor was dirty,
at any rate; the equipment was polished. But Arthur set to polishing it
again, because this morning it would be used.

There was a reclining couch in the midst of the cacophony of mechanical
and electrical complexity. Arthur brushed off the couch, touching the
leather softly with his fingertips, and then began carefully rubbing down
the metal of the machine. He tested a few levers by hand and oiled one of
them, humming to himself. But he noticed himself humming and stopped.

The machine, the time machine, was ready for operation. It was clean and
had been checked over for a week; all the parts which were doubtful had
been replaced, and on a trial run yesterday it had performed perfectly.
Robert's sweater—Robert's, of course, not Arthur's—had been
sent two days into the future and had come back. It had been sent six
months and then five years into the future, and it had still come back.
But of course Arthur had never doubted that it would.

Robert appeared in the doorway and watched him as he threw the switch and
warmed the machine. A few dials moved, and Robert stepped forward with his
intelligent eyes to read them and glance down at the figures in his hand
and nod. Arthur ignored him. He switched the machine off and stepped to
the window to look at his watch; it was 7:43 a.m. He unstrapped the watch
and handed it to Robert and went into the other room.

In the office he sat in Robert's chair by the window and looked out onto
the courtyard. The girl, eighteen and brunette, had a class across the way
at eight o'clock, and she always arrived early. Arthur always watched for
her and when he saw her he diverted brown Robert's attention, so that he
always missed seeing her. He had been doing that ever since he had seen
Robert talking with her two months before.

Presently he saw her, walking quickly through the cold and up the steps to
the courtyard. It was cold weather and she wore a heavy coat which
concealed her figure—which was a good thing. Arthur knew how young
men like cheekbone Robert liked the summer months on campus.

"What time you want to go?" he called out, and when Robert came into the
room he did not look out the window.

"At eight," said Robert.

"You're sure?"

"Of course. I told you definitely yesterday, and I seldom change my mind."

"Well, you never know," said Arthur. "Something might have come up, might
have changed your plans."

Robert smiled as though he were flexing his face muscles. "Nothing is
likely to at this point. Except perhaps an act of God."

An act of God,
Arthur repeated in his mind, wanting to look out the
window to see if the girl was safely out of sight yet.

"There's someone at the door," he said.

Robert went to the door, but there was no one there and he went outside to
look down the stairs. Arthur turned and looked for the girl. She had sat
down on a bench by the door to her building and was paging through a book,
her hair falling softly like water mist across her forehead. Even from
this distance Arthur could see that it was clean, free hair, virgin's
hair. He knew the way absent Robert would like to run his fingers through
it, caressing the girl's neck, tightly, holding her …

Robert was dangerous. No one else realized that, but Arthur had watched
young men on that campus for thirty-two years, and he recognized the look
he so often saw in Robert's eyes. So many of them, students and young
professors, had that look: veiled, covert, waxing and waning behind the
eyes, steadily building up to an explosion like an— But Arthur did
not want to think about that.

He had tried, once, to warn others about Robert, whose mind was a
labyrinth of foggy, dark halls. He had told them, down in the main office,
one day after hours. That had been the day he had seen dark Robert with
the girl, seen them together. He had told Mr. Lewis' assistant and tried
to warn her—fog Robert must be dismissed and sent away. But the
woman had hardly listened to him, and as he had stood in the outer room on
the way out, looking calmly at a chip in the baseboard, he had heard her
speaking to Mr. Lewis, the president of the university. "We have to
remember that Arthur is getting on in years," she had said. "He's probably
having a little trouble with his memory, playing tricks on him. People who
are getting on in years sometimes aren't very much in contact with
reality." Mr. Lewis' assistant was a dull, gray woman.

"Robert Ernsohn is one of our most valued young men," Mr. Lewis had said.
"We're backing his research as fully as possible, and we have every
confidence in him." Arthur had heard some papers rustle and then silence,
so he had stopped looking at the baseboard and gone out.

Not in contact with reality? Arthur had been watching the realities of
young men and their eyes through all his years at the campus, first as a
janitor, then later as an assistant in the chemistry labs and up in the
small observatory on the top floor. He had seen them looking at the girls,
light and rounded, long hair and tapered ankles and tight, swaying skirts.
He knew about realities.

He had read about them, in books from the library's locked shelves. Case
histories of sadists and murderers and twisted minds of all sorts. Men who
cut girls straight up the belly, dissected their breasts, removed the
organs of their abdomens and laid them out neatly on the floor, and then
carefully washed what remained of their bodies and put their clothes back
on them and went away. Arthur had read all those books carefully, and he
knew what reality was. It was all around him and he was certainly in
contact with it.

The door behind him opened and frowning, covert Robert came back into the
room.

"There was no one," he said, and glanced at the watch and went into the
laboratory where the machine was.

"It must be time," Arthur said, and followed him.

"Yes, it is," Robert said, sitting on the couch. Arthur pulled the scanner
forward to where it rested directly above Robert's body and set the
calibration exactly correctly. He activated the machine and waited while
it warmed.

Ambitious Robert was going into the future. Not far, just one hour
… but it would make history; he would be the first. No one else
seemed to have the slightest inkling of the method, but narrow-eyed Robert
had run across it and had built his machine, telling the administration it
was something else, keeping it secret, keeping men from the bigger
universities and corporations from coming in and taking over his work. "I
have to believe in my own abilities," Robert had said.

Arthur watched him as he lay back on the couch under the apparatus of the
machine. Robert's eyes, long-lashed, closed softly, and he drew a deep,
even breath. "I'm ready."