Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (70 page)

He eyed the road signs. They were well into Nevada by now. The old,
wearisome retreat was on.

He could never stay in the same city too long. He had to move on to new
territory, to some new place where he had no old memories, where no one
knew him, where he knew no one. In the sixteen years since he had left
home, he'd covered a lot of ground.

He remembered the jobs he had held.

He had once been a proofreader for a Chicago publishing firm. He did the
jobs of two men. The way proofreading usually worked, one man read the
copy from the manuscript, the other checked it against the galleys. Niles
had a simpler method: he would scan the manuscript once, thereby
memorizing it, and then merely check the galley for discrepancies. It
brought him $50 a week for a while, before the time came to move along.

He once held a job as a sideshow freak in a traveling carnie that made a
regular Alabama-Mississippi-Georgia circuit. Niles had
really
been
low on cash, then. He remembered how he had gotten the job: by
buttonholing the carnie boss and demanding a tryout. "Read me anything—anything
at all! I can remember it!" The boss had been skeptical and didn't see any
use for such an act anyway but finally gave in when Niles practically
fainted of malnutrition in his office. The boss read him an editorial from
a Mississippi county weekly, and when he was through Niles recited it back
word-perfect. He got the job, at $15 a week plus meals, and sat in a
little booth under a sign that said:
THE HUMAN
TAPE RECORDER
. People read or said things to him, and he repeated
them. It was dull work; sometimes the things they said were filthy, and
most of the time they couldn't even remember a minute later what they had
said to him. He stayed with the show four weeks, and when he left no one
missed him much.

The bus rolled on into the fogbound night.

There had been other jobs: good jobs, bad jobs. None of them had lasted
very long. There had been some girls, too, but none of
them
had
lasted too long. They had all, even those he tried to conceal it from,
found out about his special ability, and soon afterward they had left. No
one could stay with a man who never forgot, who could always dredge
yesterday's foibles out of the reservoir that was his mind and hurl them
unanswerably into the open. And the man with the perfect memory could
never live long among imperfect human beings.

To forgive is to forget,
he thought. The memory of old insults and
quarrels fades, and a relationship starts anew. But for him there could be
no forgetting, and hence little forgiving.

He closed his eyes after a while and leaned back against the hard leather
cushion of his seat. The steady rhythm of the bus lulled him to sleep. In
sleep, his mind could rest; he found cease from memory. He never dreamed.

In Salt Lake City he paid his fare, left the bus, suitcase in hand, and
set out in the first direction he faced. He had not wanted to go any
farther east on that bus. His cash reserve was only $63, now, and he had
to make it last.

He found a job as a dishwasher in a downtown restaurant, held it long
enough to accumulate a hundred dollars, and moved on again, this time
hitchhiking to Cheyenne. He stayed there a month and took a night bus to
Denver, and when he left Denver it was to go to Wichita.

Wichita to Des Moines, Des Moines to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to
Milwaukee, then down through Illinois, carefully avoiding Chicago, and on
to Indianapolis. It was an old story for him, this traveling. Gloomily he
celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday alone in an Indianapolis rooming
house on a drizzly October day and for the purpose of brightening the
occasion summoned up his old memories of his fourth birthday party, in
1933 … one of the few unalloyedly happy days of his life.

They were all there, all his playmates, and his parents, and his brother,
Hank, looking gravely important at the age of eight, and his sister,
Marian, and there were candles and favors and punch and cake. Mrs.
Heinsohn from next door stopped in and said, "He looks like a regular
little man," and his parents beamed at him, and everyone sang and had a
good time. And afterward, when the last game had been played, the last
present opened, when the boys and girls had waved good-bye and disappeared
up the street, the grownups sat around and talked of the new president and
the many strange things that were happening in the country, and little
Tommy sat in the middle of the floor, listening and recording everything
and glowing warmly, because somehow during the whole afternoon no one had
said or done anything cruel to him. He was happy that day, and he went to
bed still happy.

Niles ran through the party twice, like an old movie he loved well; the
print never grew frayed, the registration always remained as clear and
sharp as ever. He could taste the sweet tang of the punch, he could relive
the warmth of that day when through some accident the others had allowed
him a little happiness.

Finally he let the brightness of the party fade, and once again he was in
Indianapolis on a gray bleak afternoon, alone in an $8-a-week furnished
room.

Happy birthday to me,
he thought bitterly.
Happy birthday.

He stared at the blotchy green wall with the cheap Corot print hung
slightly askew. I could have been something special, he brooded, one of
the wonders of the world. Instead I'm a skulking freak who lives in dingy
third-floor back rooms, and I don't dare let the world know what I can do.

He scooped into his memory and came up with the Toscanini performance of
Beethoven's Ninth he had heard in Carnegie Hall once while he was in New
York. It was infinitely better than the later performance Toscanini had
approved for recording, yet no microphones had taken it down; the blazing
performance was as far beyond recapture as a flame five minutes snuffed,
except in one man's mind, Niles had it all: the majestic downcrash of the
timpani, the resonant perspiring basso bringing forth the great melody of
the finale, even the french-horn bobble that must have enraged the maestro
so, the infuriating cough from the dress circle at the gentlest moment of
the adagio, the sharp pinching of Niles' shoes as he leaned forward in his
seat …

He had it all, in highest fidelity.
There
are
compensations,
he thought.
But oh, the price I pay for my Beethoven!

He arrived in the small town on a moonless night three months later, a
cold, crisp January evening when the wintry wind swept in from the north,
cutting through his thin clothing and making the suitcase an almost
impossible burden for his numb, gloveless hand. He had not meant to come
to this place, but he had run short of cash in Kentucky, and there had
been no helping it. He was on his way to New York, where he could live in
anonymity for months unbothered, and where he knew his rudeness would go
unnoticed if he happened to snub someone on the street, or if he greeted
someone who had forgotten him.

But New York was still hundreds of miles away, and it might have been
millions on this January night. He saw a sign:
BAR
.
He forced himself forward toward the sputtering neon; he wasn't ordinarily
a drinker, but he needed the warmth of alcohol inside him now, and perhaps
the barkeep would need a man to help out or could at least rent him a room
for what little he had in his pockets.

There were five men in the bar when he reached it. They looked like
truckdrivers. Niles dropped his valise to the left of the door, rubbed his
stiff hands together, exhaled a white cloud. The bartender grinned
jovially at him.

"Cold enough for you out there?"

Niles managed a grin. "I wasn't sweating much. Let me have something
warming. Double shot of bourbon, maybe."

That would be 90¢. He had $7.34.

He nursed the drink when it came, sipped it slowly, let it roll down his
gullet. He thought of the summer he had been stranded for a week in
Washington, a solid week of 97° temperature and 97 humidity, and the
vivid memory helped to ease away some of the psychological effects of the
coldness.

He relaxed; he warmed. Behind him came the penetrating sound of argument.

"… I tell you Joe Louis beat Schmeling to a pulp the second time!
KO'd him in the first round!"

"You're nuts! Louis just barely got him down in a fifteen-round decision,
the second bout."

"Seems to me—"

"I'll put money on it. Ten bucks says it was a decision in fifteen, Mac."

Sound of confident chuckles. "I wouldn't want to take your money so easy,
pal. Everyone knows it was a knockout in one."

"Ten bucks, I said."

Niles turned to see what was happening. Two of the truckdrivers, burly men
in dark pea jackets, stood nose-to-nose. Automatically the thought came:
Louis knocked Max Schmeling out in the first round at Yankee Stadium,
New York, June 22, 1938.
Niles had never been much of a sports fan,
and particularly disliked boxing- but he had once glanced at an almanac
page cataloguing Joe Louis' title fights.

He watched detachedly as the bigger of the two truckdrivers angrily
slapped a ten-dollar bill down on the bar; the other matched it. Then the
first glanced up at the barkeep and said. "Okay, Bud. You're a shrewd guy.
Who's right about the second Louis-Schmeling fight?"

The barkeep was a blank-faced cipher of a man, middle-aged, balding, with
mild empty eyes. He chewed at his lip a moment, shrugged, fidgeted,
finally said, "Kinda hard for me to remember. That musta been twenty-five
years ago."

Twenty,
Niles thought.

"Lessee now," the bartender went on. "Seems to me I remember …
yeah, sure. It went the full fifteen and the judges gave it to Louis. I
seem to remember a big stink being made over it; the papers said Joe
should've killed him a lot faster'n that."

A triumphant grin appeared on the bigger driver's face. He deftly pocketed
both bills.

The other man grimaced and howled, "Hey! You two fixed this thing up
beforehand! I know damn well that Louis KO'd the German in one."

"You heard what the man said. The money's mine."

"No," Niles said suddenly, in a quiet voice that seemed to carry halfway
across the bar.
Keep your mouth shut,
he told himself frantically.
This is none of your business. Stay out of it!

But it was too late.

"What you say?" asked the one who'd dropped the ten-spot.

"I say you're being rooked. Louis won the fight in one round, like you
say. June 22, 1938 , Yankee Stadium. The barkeep's thinking of the Arturo
Godoy fight.
That
went the full fifteen in 1940."

"There—told you! Gimme back my money!"

But the other driver ignored the cry and turned to face Niles. He was a
cold-faced, heavy-set man, and his fists were starting to clench. "Smart
man, eh? Boxing expert?"

"I just didn't want to see anybody get cheated," Niles said stubbornly. He
knew what was coming now. The truckdriver was weaving drunkenly toward
him; the barkeep was yelling, the other patrons backing away.

The first punch caught Niles in the ribs; he grunted and staggered back,
only to be grabbed by the throat and slapped three times. Dimly he heard a
voice saying, "Hey, leggo the guy! He didn't mean anything! You want to
kill him?"

A volley of blows doubled him up; a knuckle swelled his right eyelid, a
fist crashed stunningly into his left shoulder. He spun, wobbled
uncertainly, knowing that his mind would permanently record every moment
of this agony.

Through half-closed eyes he saw them pulling the enraged driver off him;
the man writhed in the grip of three others, aimed a last desperate kick
at Niles' stomach and grazed a rib, and finally was subdued.

Niles stood alone in the middle of the floor, forcing himself to stay
upright, trying to shake off the sudden pain that drilled through him in a
dozen places.

"You all right?" a solicitous voice asked. "Hell, those guys play rough.
You oughtn't mix up with them."

"I'm all right," Niles said hollowly. "Just … let me … catch
my breath."

"Here. Sit down. Have a drink. It'll fix you up."

"No," Niles said.
I can't stay here. I have to get moving.
"I'll be
all right," he muttered unconvincingly. He picked up his suitcase, wrapped
his coat tight about him, and left the bar, step by step by step.

He got fifteen feet before the pain became unbearable. He crumpled
suddenly and fell forward on his face in the dark, feeling the iron-hard
frozen turf against his cheek, and struggled unsuccessfully to get up. He
lay there, remembering all the various pains of his life, the beatings,
the cruelty, and when the weight of memory became too much to bear, he
blanked out.

The bed was warm, the sheets clean and fresh and soft. Niles woke slowly,
feeling a temporary sensation of disorientation, and then his infallible
memory supplied the data on his blackout in the snow and he realized he
was in a hospital.

He tried to open his eyes; one was swollen shut, but he managed to get the
other's lids apart. He was in a small hospital room—no shining
metropolitan hospital pavilion, but a small county clinic with gingerbread
molding on the walls and homey lace curtains, through which afternoon
sunlight was entering.

So he had been found and brought to a hospital. That was good. He could
easily have died out there in the snow; but someone had stumbled over him
and brought him in. That was a novelty, that someone had bothered to help
him; the treatment he had received in the bar last night—was it last
night?—was more typical of the world's attitude toward him. In
twenty-nine years he had somehow failed to learn adequate concealment,
camouflage, and every day he suffered the consequences. It was so hard for
him to remember, he who remembered everything else, that the other people
were not like him and hated him for what he was.