The Collection (65 page)

But she did ask: "Charles-you
do
want to marry
me, don't y? I mean, if there's any doubt in your mind and that's what has been
worrying you, we can postpone the wedding till you're sure whether you love me
enough-
^"

"Love you?
^"
Charlie was
aghast. "Why-"

And he proved it pretty satisfactorily.

So satisfactorily, in fact, that he completely forgot his
original intention to suggest that very postponement. But
never
for the
reason she suggested. With his arms around Jane-well, the poor chap was only
human.

A man in love is a drunken man, and you can
^'
t exactly
blame a drunkard for what he does under the influence of alcohol. You can
blame him, of course, for getting drunk in the first place; but you can
^'
t
put even that much blame on a man in love. In all probability, he fell through
no fault of his own. In all probability his original intentions were strictly
dishonorable; then, when those intentions met resistance, the subtle chemistry
of sublimation converted them into the stuff that stars are made of.

Probably that was why he didn
^'
t go to see an
alienist the next day. He was a bit afraid of what an alienist might tell him.
He weakened and decided to wait and see if anything else happened.

Maybe nothing else would happen.

There was a comforting popular superstition that things went
in groups of three, and three things had happened already.

Sure, that was it. From now on, he
^'
d be all
right. After all, there wasn't anything basically wrong; there couldn
^'
t
be. He was in good health. Aside from Tuesday, he hadn't missed a day's work at
the print shop in two years.

And-well, by now it was Friday noon and nothing had happened
for a full twenty-four hours, and nothing was going to happen again.

It didn't, Friday, but he read something that jolted him out
of his precarious complacency.

A newspaper account.

He sat down in the restaurant at a table at which a previous
diner had left a morning paper. Charlie read it while he was waiting for his
order to be taken. He finished scanning the front page before the waitress
came, and the comic section while he was eating his soup, and then turned idly
to the local page.

GUARD AT MUSEUM IS
SUSPENDED
Curator Orders Investigation

And the cold spot in his stomach got larger and colder as he
read, for there it was in black and white.

The wild duck had really been in the showcase. No one could
figure out how it had been put there. They
^'
d had to take the
showcase apart to get it out, and the showcase showed no indication of having been
tampered with. It had been puttied up air-tight to keep out dust, and the putty
had not been damaged.

A guard, for reasons not clearly given in the article, had
been given a three-day suspension. One gathered from the wording of the story
that the curator of the museum had felt the necessity of doing
something
about
the matter.

Nothing of value was missing from the case. One Chinese coin
with a hole in the middle, a haikwan tad, made of silver, had not been findable
after the affair; but it wasn
^'
t worth much. There was some doubt as
to whether it had been stolen by one of the workmen who had disassembled the
showcase or whether it had been accidentally thrown out with the debris of old
putty.

The reporter, telling the thing humorously, suggested that
probably the duck had mistaken the coin for a doughnut because of the hole, and
had eaten it. And that the curator
^'
s best revenge would be to eat
the duck.

The police had been called in, but had taken the attitude that
the whole affair must have been a practical joke. By whom or how accomplished,
they didn
^'
t know. Charlie put down the paper and stared moodily
across the room.

Then it definitely
hadn't
been a double
hallucination, a case of his imagining both duck and attendant. And until now
that the bottom had fallen out of that idea, Charlie hadn't realized how
strongly he'd counted on the possibility.

Now he was back where he'd started.

Unless--

But that was absurd. Of course, theoretically, the newspaper
item he had just read
could
be an hallucination too, but--No, that was
too much to swallow. According to that line of reasoning, if he went around to
the museum and talked to the curator, the curator himself would be an
hallucin--

"Your duck, sir."

Charlie jumped halfway out of his chair.

Then he saw it was the waitress standing at the side of the
table with his entree, and that she had spoken because he had the newspaper
spread out and there wasn
^'
t room for her to put it down.

"Didn't you order roast duck, sir? I--
^"

Charlie stood up hastily, averting his eyes from the dish.

He said, "Sorry-gotta-make-a-phone-call,
^"
and hastily handed the astonished waitress a dollar bill and strode out. Had he
really ordered--Not exactly; he'd told her to bring him the special.

But eat duck? He'd rather eat ... no, not fried angle-worms
either. He shuddered.

He hurried back to the office, despite the fact that he was
half an hour early, and felt better once he was within the safe four walls of
the Hapworth Printing Co. Nothing out of the way had happened to him there.

As yet.

Basically, Charlie Wills was quite a healthy young man. By
two o
^'
clock in the afternoon, he was so hungry that he sent one of
the office boys downstairs to buy him a couple of sandwiches.

And he ate them. True, he lifted up the top slice of bread
on each and looked inside. He didn't know what he expected to find there, aside
from boiled ham and butter and a piece of lettuce, but if he had found-in lieu
of one of those ingredients-say, a Chinese silver coin with a hole in the
middle, he would not have been more than ordinarily surprised.

It was a dull afternoon at the plant, and Charlie had time
to do quite a bit of thinking. Even a bit of research. He remembered that the
plant had printed, several years before, a textbook on entomology. He found the
file copy and industriously paged through it looking for a winged worm. He
found a few winged things that might be called worms, but none that even
remotely resembled the angleworm with the halo. Not even, for that matter, if
he disregarded the golden circle, and tried to make identification solely on
the basis of body and wings.

No flying angleworms.

There weren't any medical books in which he could look up-or
try to look up-how one could get sun-burned without a sun.

But he looked up
^"
tael
^"
in
the dictionary, and found that it was equivalent to a Jiang, which was
one-sixteenth of a catty. And that one official hang is equivalent to a
hectogram.

None of which seemed particularly helpful.

Shortly before five o'clock he went around saying good-by to
everyone, because this was the last day at the office before his two weeks'
vacation, and the good-byes were naturally complicated by good wishes on his
impending wedding-which would take place in the first week of his vacation.

He had to shake hands with everybody but the Pest, whom, of
course, he
^'
d be seeing frequently during the fi
^r
st few
days of his vacation. In fact, he went home with her from work to have dinner
with the Pembertons.

And it was a quiet, restful, pleasant dinner that left him
feeling better than he'd felt since last Sunday morning. Here in the calm
harbor of the Pemberton household, the absurd things that had happened to him
seemed so far away and so utterly fantastic that he almost doubted if they had
happened at all.

And he felt utterly, completely certain that it was all
over. Things happened in threes, didn't they? If any thing else happened--But
it wouldn
^'
t.

It didn't, that night.

Jane solicitously sent him home at nine o'clock to get to
bed early. But she kissed him good night so tenderly, and withal so
effectively, that he walked down the street with his head in rosy clouds.

Then, suddenly--out of nothing, as it were--Charlie
remembered that the museum attendant had been suspended, and was losing three
days
^'
pay, because of the episode of the duck in the showcase. And
if that duck business was Charlie's fault-even indirectly-didn
^'
t he
owe it to the guy to step forward and explain to the museum directors that the
attendant had been in no way to blame, and that he should not be penalized?

After all, he, Charlie, had probably scared the poor attendant
half out of his wits by suggesting that he could repeat the performance with a
sarcophagus instead of a showcase, and the attendant had told such a
disconnected story that he hadn
^'
t been believed.

But
-had
the thing been his fault?
Did
he owe--

And there he was butting his head against that brick wall of
impossibility again. Trying to solve the insoluble.

And he knew, suddenly, that he had been weak in not breaking
his engagement to Jane. That what had happened three times within the short
space of a week might all too easily happen again.

Gosh! Even at the ceremony. Suppose he reached for the wedding
ring and pulled out a--

From the rosy clouds of bliss to the black mire of despair
had proved to be a walk of less than a block.

Almost he turned back toward the Pemberton home to tell them
tonight, then decided not to. Instead, he'd stop by and talk with Pete Johnson.

Maybe Pete--

What he really hoped was that Pete would talk him out of his
decision.

Pete Johnson had a gallon jug, almost full, of wine. Mellow
sherry. And Pete had sampled it, and was mellow, too.

He refused even to listen to Charlie, until his guest had
drunk one glass and had a second on the table in front of him. Then he said,
"You got something on your mind. O. K., shoot.
^"

"Lookit, Pete. I told you about that angleworm business.
In fact, you were practically there when it happened. And you know about what
happened Tuesday morning on my way to work. But yesterday-well, what happened
was worse, I guess. Because another guy saw it. It was a duck."

"What was a duck?
^"

"In a showcase at- Wait, I'll start at the beginning.
^"
And he did, and Pete listened.

"Well," he said thoughtfully, "the fact that
it was in the newspaper quashes one line of thought. Uh ... fortunately.
Listen, I don
^'
t see what you got to worry about. Aren't you making a
mountain out of a few molehills?"

Charlie took another sip of the sherry and lighted a
cigarette and said,
^"
How?
^"
quite hopefully.

"Well, three screwy things have happened. But you take
any one by itself and it doesn't amount to a hill of beans, does it? Any one of
them can be explained. Where you bog down is in sitting there insisting on a
blanket explanation for all of them.

"How do you know there is any connection at all? Now,
take them separately-
^"

"You take them," suggested Charlie. "How
would you explain them so easy as all that?
^"

"First one's a cinch. Your stomach was upset or
something and you had a pure hallucination. Happens to the best people once in
a while. Or-you got a second choice just as simple-maybe you saw a new kind of
bug. Hell, there are probably thousands of insects that haven't been classified
yet. New ones get on the list every pear.
^"

^"
Urn," said Charlie.
^"
And
the heat business?"

^"
Nell, doctors don
^'
t know
everything. You got too mad seeing that teamster beating the horse, and anger
has a physical effect, hasn't it? You slipped a cog somewhere. Maybe it
affected your thermodermal gland."

^"
What's a thermodermal gland?"

Pete grinned. "I just invented it. But why not? The
medicos are constantly finding new ones or new purposes of old ones. And
there's
something
in your body that acts as a thermostat and keeps your
skin temperature constant. Maybe it went wrong for a minute. Look what a
pituitary gland can do for you or against you. Not to mention the parathyroids
and the pineal and the adrenals.

^"
Nothing to it, Charlie. Have some more
wine. Now, let
^'
s take the duck business. If you don't think about it
with the other two things in mind, there's nothing exciting about it.
Undoubtedly just a practical joke on the museum or by somebody working there.
It was just coincidence that
you
walked in on it."

"But the showcase-"

"Bother the showcase! It could have been done somehow;
you didn't check that showcase yourself, and you know what newspapers are. And,
for that matter, look what Thurston and Houdini could do with things like that,
and let you examine the receptacles before and after. Maybe, too, it wasn't
just a joke. Maybe somebody had a purpose putting it there, but why think that
purpose had any connection with you? You're an egotist, that's what you
are."

Charlie sighed.
^"
Yes, but- But you take the
three things together, and-"

"Why
take them together? Look, this morning I
saw a man slip on a banana peel and fall; this afternoon I had a slight
toothache; this evening I got a telephone call from a girl I haven't seen in
years. Now
why
should I take those three events and try to figure one
common cause for all of them? One underlying motif for all three? I'd go nuts,
if I tried."