The Collection (63 page)

"Come on, get it out of your system. Give."

"Dammit, Pete,
it had a halo!
^"

The car swerved a bit, and Pete cased it back to the middle
of the road before he said "A what?"

"Well," said Charlie defensively, "it looked
like a halo. It was a little round golden circle just above its head. It didn
^'
t
seem to be attached; it just floated there.
^"

"How
^'
d you know it was its head? Doesn't a
worm look alike on both ends?
^"

"Well," said Charlie, and he stopped to consider
the matter. How
had
he known? "Welt," he said, "since it
was a halo, wouldn
^'
t it be kind of silly for it to have a halo
around the wrong end? I mean, even sillier than to have- Hell, you know what I
mean."

Pete said, "Hmph." Then, after the car was around
a curve: "All right
_,
let
^'
s be strictly logical. Let
^'
s
assume you saw, or thought you saw, what you . . . uh ... thought you saw. Now,
you're not a heavy drinker so it wasn
^'
t D. T's. Far as I can see,
that leaves three possibilities."

Charlie said,
^"
I see two of them. It could
have been a pure hallucination. People do have 'em, I guess, but I never had
one before. Or I suppose it could have been a dream, maybe. I
^'
m sure
I didn't, but I suppose that I could, have gone to sleep there and dreamed I
saw it. But
that
isn
^'
t very likely, is it?

"I
^'
ll concede the possibility of an
hallucination, but not a dream. What's the third?
^"

"Ordinary fact. That you really saw a winged worm. I
mean
_,
that there is such a thing, for all I know. And you were just
mistaken about it not having wings when you first saw it, because they were
folded. And what you thought looked like a . . . uh . . . halo, was some sort
of a crest or antenna or something. There
are
some damn funny-looking
bugs.
^"

"Yeah," said Charlie. But he didn't believe it.
There may be funny-looking bugs, but none that suddenly sprout wings and haloes
and ascend unto heaven.

He took another drink out of the bottle.

Sunday afternoon and evening he spent with Jane, and the
episode of the ascending angleworm slipped into the back of Charlie's mind.
Anything, except Jane, tended to slip there when he was with her.

At bedtime when he was alone again, it came back. The
thought, not the worm. So strongly that he couldn't sleep, and he got up and
sat in the armchair by the window and decided the only way to get it out of
his mind was to think it through.

If he could pin things down and decide what had really
happened out there at the edge of the flower bed; then maybe he could forget it
completely.

O. K.
_,
he told himself, let's be strictly
logical.

Pete had been right about the three possibilities. Hallucination,
dream, reality. Now to begin with, it
hadn't
been a dream. He'd been wide
awake; he was as sure of that as he was sure of anything. Eliminate that.

Reality? That was impossible, too. It was all right for Pete
to talk about the funniness of insects and the possibility of antennae, and
such-but Pete hadn't
seen
the danged thing. Why, it had flown past only
inches from his eyes. And that halo had really
been
there.

Antennae? Nuts.

And that left hallucination. That's what it must have been,
hallucination. After all, people
do
have hallucinations. Unless it
happened often, it didn't necessarily mean you were a candidate for the booby
hatch. All right then accept that it was an hallucination, and so what? So
forget it.

'With that decided, he went to bed and-by thinking about
Jane again-happily to sleep.

The next morning was Monday and he went back to work.

And the morning after that was Tuesday.

And on Tuesday.

It wasn’t an ascending angleworm this time. It wasn't
anything you could put your finger on, unless you can put your finger on
sunburn, and that's painful sometimes.

But sunburn in a rainstorm?

It was raining when Charlie Wills left home that morning,
but it wasn
^'
t raining hard at that time, which was a few minutes
after eight. A mere drizzle. Charlie pulled down the brim of his hat and buttoned
up his raincoat and decided to walk to work anyway. He rather liked walking in
rain. And he had time; he didn't have to be there until eight-thirty.

Three blocks away from work, he encountered the Pest, hound
in the same direction. The Pest was Jane Pemberton
^'
s kid sister, and
her right name was Paula, but most people had forgotten the fact. She worked at
the Hapworth Printing Co., just as Charlie did; but she was a copyholder for
one of the proofreaders and he was assistant production manager.

But he'd met Jane through her
_,
at a party given
for employees.

He said, "Hi there, Pest. Aren't you afraid you'll
melt?" For it was raining harder now, definitely harder.

"Hello, Charlie-warlie. I like to walk in the rain.
^"

She
would,
thought Charlie bitterly. At the hated
nick-name Charlie-warlie, he writhed. Jane had called him that once, but-after
he'd talked reason to her-never again. Jane was reasonable. But the Pest had
heard it- And Charlie was mortally afraid, ever after, that she'd sometime call
him that at work, with other employees in hearing. And if
that
ever
happened-

"Listen
_,
" he protested, "can't you
forget that darn fool . . . uh . . . nickname? I
^'
ll quit calling you
Pest, if you'll quit calling me . . . uh . . .
that."

"But I
like
to he called the Pest.
Why
don't
you like to he called Charlie-warlie?"

She grinned at him, and Charlie writhed inwardly. Because
she was
who
she was, he didn't dare say.

There was pent-up anger in him as he walked into the blowing
rain, head bent low to keep it out of his face. Damn the brat--

With vision limited to a few yards of sidewalk directly
ahead of him, Charlie probably wouldn't have seen the teamster and the horse if
he hadn't heard the cracks that sounded like pistol shots.

He looked up, and saw. In the middle of the street, maybe
fifty feet ahead of Charlie and the Pest and moving toward them, came an
overloaded wagon. It was drawn by an aged, desponded horse, a horse so old and
bony that the slow walk by which it progressed seemed to be its speediest
possible rate of movement.

But the teamster obviously didn't think so. He was a big,
ugly
man with an unshaven
_,
swarthy face. He was standing up, swinging
his heavy whip for another blow. It came down, and the old horse quivered under
it and seemed to sway between the shafts.

The whip lifted again.

And Charlie yelled "Hey, there!" and started
toward the wagon.

He wasn
^'
t certain yet just what he was going to
do about it if the brute beating the other brute refused to stop. But it was
going to be something. Seeing an animal mistreated was something Charlie Wills
just couldn't stand. And wouldn
^'
t stand.

He yelled
^"
Hey!" again, because the
teamster didn
^'
t seem to have heard him the first time, and he
started forward at a trot, along the curb.

The teamster heard that second yell, and he might have heard
the first. Because he turned and looked squarely at Charlie. Then he raised the
whip again, even higher, and brought it down on the horse's welt-streaked back
with all his might.

Things went red in front of Charlie
^'
s eyes. He
didn't yell again. He knew darned well now what he was going to do. It began
with pulling that teamster down off the wagon where he could get at him. And
then he was going to beat him to a pulp.

He heard Paula's high heels clicking as she started after
him and called out, "Charlie, be caref-"

But that was all of it that he heard. Because, just at that
moment, it happened.

A sudden blinding wave of intolerable heat, a sensation as
though he had just stepped into the heart of a fiery furnace. He gasped once
for breath, as the very air in his lungs and in his throat seemed to be
scorching hot. And his skin--

Blinding pain, just for an instant. Then it was gone, but
too late. The shock had been too sudden and intense, and as he felt again the
cool rain in his face, he went dizzy and rubbery all over, and lost
consciousness. He didn't even feel the impact of his fall.

Darkness.

And then he opened his eyes into a blur of white that
resolved itself into white walls and white sheets over him and a nurse in a
white uniform, who said
_,
"Doctor! He's regained consciousness.
^"

Footsteps and the closing of a door, and there was Doc
Palmer frowning down at him.

^"
Well, Charles, what have you been up to
now?
^"
Charlie grinned a bit weakly. He said, "Hi, doc.
I'll bite. What
have
I been up to?"

Doe Palmer pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat down in
it. He reached out for Charlie
^'
s wrist and held it while he looked
at the second hand of his watch. Then he read the chart at the end of the bed
and said "Hmph."

^"
Is that the diagnosis," Charlie wanted
to know,
^"
or the treatment? Listen, first what about the
teamster? That is if you know-"

"Paula told rue what happened. Teamster's under arrest,
and fired. You
^'
re all right, Charles. Nothing serious,"

^"
Nothing serious? What's it a non-serious
case of? In other words, what happened to me?
^"

"You keeled over. Prostration. And you'll be peeling
for a few days, but that's all. Why didn't you use a lotion of some kind
yesterday?"

Charlie closed his eyes and opened them again slowly. And
said,
^"
Why didn't I use a- For
what?"

"The sunburn, of course. Don't you know you can
^'
t
go swimming on a sunny day and not get-"

^"
But I wasn't swimming yesterday, doc. Nor the
day before. Gosh, not for a couple weeks, in fact. What do you mean,
sunburn?"

Doc Palmer rubbed his chin. He said, "You better rest a
while, Charles. If you feel all right by this evening, you can go borne. But
you'd better not work tomorrow."

He got up and went out.

The nurse was still there, and Charlie looked at her
blankly. He said, "Is Doc Palmer going-Listen, what's this all
about?"

The nurse was looking at him queerly. She said, "Why!
you were. . . . I'm sorry, Mr. Wills, but a nurse isn't allowed to discuss a
diagnosis with a patient. But you haven't anything to worry about; you heard
Dr. Palmer, say you could go home this afternoon or evening."

"Nuts," said Charlie. "Listen, what time is
it? Or aren’t nurses allowed to tell that?
^"

“It’s ten-thirty."

^"
Golly, and I've been here almost two
hours." He figured back; remembering now that he'd passed a clock that
said twenty-four minutes after eight just as they'd turned the corner for that
last block. And, if he'd been awake again now for five minutes, then for two
full hours.

^"
Anything else you want, sir?"

Charlie shook his head slowly. And then because he wanted
her to leave so he could sneak a look at that chart, he said, "Well, yes.
Could I have a glass of orange juice?"

As soon as
she was gone, he sat up in bed. It hurt a
little to do that, and he found his skin was a bit tender to the touch. He
looked at his arms, pulling up the sleeves of the hospital nightshirt they
^'
d
put on him, and the skin was pinkish. Just the shade of pink that meant the first
stage of a mild sunburn.

He looked down inside the nightshrt, and then at his legs,
and said, "What the hell-" Because the sunburn, if it was sunburn,
was uniform all over.

And that didn't make sense, because he hadn't been in the
sun enough to get burned at any time recently, and he hadn
^'
t been in
the sun at all without his clothes. And--yes, the sunburn extended even over
the area which would have been covered by trunks if he
had
gone
swimming.

But maybe the chart would explain. He reached over the foot
of the bed and took the clipboard with the chart off the hook.

"Reported that patient fainted suddenly on street
without apparent cause. Pulse 135, respiration labored, temperature 104, upon
admission. All returned to normal within first hour. Symptoms seem to
approximate those of heat prostration, but--"

Then there were a few qualifying comments which were highly
technical-sounding. Charlie didn't understand them, and somehow he had a hunch
that Doc Palmer didn
^'
t understand them either. They had a whistling-in-the-dark
sound to them.

Click of heels in the hall outside and he put the chart back
quickly and ducked under the covers. Surprisingly, there was a knock. Nurses
wouldn
^'
t knock, would they?

He said, "Come in.
^"

It was Jane. Looking more beautiful than ever, with her big
brown eyes a bit bigger with fright. "Darling! I came as soon as the Pest
called home and told me. But she was awfully vague. What on earth
happened?"