The Perfect Host (26 page)

“I dunno. You look like I feel. Sort of—well, you’ve finally unloaded something, and it hurts to lose it, but you’re glad you did.”

“On the nose,” he said, and grinned sheepishly. “Yup, Henry—I really hugged that project to me. Want to hear about it?”

Anything but Cordelia, I thought. “I saw your rig,” I said, to break the ice. “The night you sent me out for the wire. You left the workshop open.”

“I’ll be darned. I thought I’d gotten away with it.”

“Mother knew what you were up to, though she didn’t know how.”

“And you saw how.”

“I saw that weird gimmick of your, but it didn’t mean anything to me. Mother told me never to mention it to you. She thought you’d be happier if you were left alone.”

He laughed with real delight. “Bless her heart,” he said. “She was a most understanding woman.”

“I read about the Martian signals in the papers,” I said. “Fellow named—what was it?”

“Jenkins,” said Dad. “C. Francis Jenkins. He built a film-tape recorder to catch the signals. Primitive, but it worked. Dr. David Todd of Amherst was the man who organized the whole project, and got the big radio people all over the world to cooperate. They had a five-minute silence every hour during Mars’ closest proximity—August 1 to 3.”

“I remember,” I said. “It was my birthday, 1924. What got you so teed off?”

“I got mad,” said my father, folding his hands over his stomach. “Just because it had become fashionable to use radio in a certain way on earth, those simple souls had to assume that the Martian signals—if any—would come through the same way. I felt they’d be different.”

“Why should they be?”

“Why should we expect Martians to be the same? Or even think the same? I just took a wild stab at it, that’s all. I tuned in on six wavelengths at the same time. I set up my rig so that anything coming through on any one wavelength would actuate a particular phone.”

“I remember,” I said, trying hard. “The iron filings on the paper tape, over the ear-phones.”

“That’s right. The phone was positioned far enough below the tape so that the magnetic field would barely contain the filings. When the diaphragm vibrated, the filings tended to cluster. I had six phones on six different wavelengths, arranged like this,” and he counted them out on the palm of his hand:

1           2
3           4
5           6

“What could you get? I don’t figure it, Dad. There’d be no way of separating your dots and dashes.”

“Blast!” he exploded. “That the kind of thinking that made me mad, and makes me mad to this day! No; what I was after was something completely different in transmission. Look; how much would you get out of piano music if all the strings but one were broken? Only when the pianist hit that note in the course of his transmission would you hear anything. See what I mean? Supposing the Martians were sending in notes and chords of an established octave of frequencies? Sure—Jenkins got signals. No one’s ever been able to interpret them. Well, supposing I was right—then Jenkins was recording only one of several or many ‘notes’ of the scale, and of course it was meaningless.”

“Well, what did you get?”

“Forty-six photographs, five of which were so badly under-exposed that they were useless to me. I finally got the knack of moving the tape carefully enough and lighting it properly, and they came out pretty well. I got signals on four of the six frequencies. I got the same grouping only three or four times; I mean, sometimes there would be something on phones 1, 2, and 4, and sometimes it would only be on 4, and sometimes it would be on 2 and 6. Three and 5 never did come through; it was fantastic luck that I picked the right frequencies, I suppose, for the other four.”

“What frequencies did you use?”

He grinned. “I don’t know. I really don’t. It was all by guess and by Golly. I never was an engineer, Henry. I’m in the insurance business. I had no instruments—particularly not in 1924. I wound a 6000-meter coil according to specs they printed in the paper. As for the others, I worked on the knowledge that less turns of heavier wire means shorter wave-lengths. I haven’t got the coils now and couldn’t duplicate ’em in a million years. All I can say for sure is that they were all different, and stepped down from 6000.

“Anyway, I studied those things till I was blue in the face. It must’ve been the better part of a year before I called in anyone else. I wrote to Mr. Jenkins and Dr. Todd, too, but who am I? A taxidermical broker with a wacky idea. They sent the pictures back with polite letters, and I can’t say I blame them … anyway, good riddance to the things. But it was a wonderful idea, and I wanted so much to be
the man who did the job.… Ever want something so badly you couldn’t see straight, Henry?”

“Me?” I asked, with bitterness.

“It’s all over now, though. I’m through with crazy projects, for life. Never again. But gosh, I did love that project. Know what I mean?”

“No,” I said with even more bitterness.

He sat straight. “Hey, I’m sorry, fellow. Those were rhetorical questions. Maybe you’d better spill it.”

So I told it to him—all of it. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I told him about the moon poem and the “well, really” gimmick and the “please don’t translate” routine, and the more I talked, the worse I felt. He sat and listened, and didn’t say “I told you so,” and the idea was worming its way into the back of my mind as I talked that here sat one of the most understanding people ever created, when he screamed. He screamed as one screams at the intrusion of an ice-cube into the back of one’s bathing-suit.

“What’s the matter?” I said, breaking off.

“Go on, go on,” he gabbled. “Henry you idiot don’t tell me you don’t know what you’re saying for Pete’s sake tell it to—”

“Whoa! I don’t even remember where I was.”

“What she said to you—‘Are you a terrestrial?’ ”

“Oh, don’t get so excited, Dad. It doesn’t mean anything. Why bother? She was trying to interest me, I suppose. I didn’t let it get to me then and I won’t now. She—”

“
Blast
her! I’m not talking about her. It was what she said. Go on, Henry! You say she wrote something?”

He wormed it all out of me. He forced me to go over it and over it. The windows paled and the single light by the book case looked yellow and ill in the dawn, but still he pounded at me. And I finally quit. I just quit, out of compounded exhaustion and stubbornness. I lay back in the big chair and glared at him.

He strode up and down the room, trying to beat his left hand to a pulp with a right fist. “Of course, of course,” he said excitedly. “That’s how they’d do it. The blankest mind in the world. Blank
and sensitive, like undeveloped film.
Of course!
‘Making contact thirty years’ they said. ‘Much power making contact this way—very high frequencies thought.’ A radionic means of transmitting thought, and it uses too much power to be practical. ‘Easy radio. Not again thought.’ ”

He stopped in front of me, glaring. “ ‘Not again thought,’ ” he growled. “You—you
dope!
How could my flesh and blood be so abjectly stupid? There in your hands you held the interplanetary Rosetta Stone, and what did you do with it?”

I glared back at him. “I was quote consigning one of my beloved failures to the flames end quote,” I said nastily.

Suddenly he was slumped and tired. “So you were, son. So you were. And it was all there—little Braille, you said. A series of phonetic symbols, and almost a certainly a list of the frequency-octave they use. And—and all my pictures.… I burned them too.” He sat down.

“Henry—”

“Don’t take it so hard, Dad,” I said. “Your advice was good. You forget your Martians and I’ll forget my moron. When a fellow get to be a grown-up man—”

He didn’t hear me. “Henry. You say her folks like you?”

I sprang to my feet. “NO!” I bellowed. “Dad, I will not, repeat,
not
under any circumstances woo that beautiful package of brainless reflexes. I have had mine. I—”

“You really mean it, don’t you?”

“That I do,” I said positively.

“Well,” he said dejectedly, “I guess that’s that.”

And that old, old fever came back into his face.

“Dad—”

He slowly straightened up, that hot “Land ho!” expression in his eyes. My father is hale, handsome, and, when he wants to be, extremely persistent.

“Now, Dad,” I said. “Let’s be reasonable. She’s very young, Dad. Now, let’s talk this thing over a little more, Dad. You can’t go following a girl all over the house with a notebook and pencil. They said
they wouldn’t use the thought contact again. Dad. Now Dad—”

“Your mother would understand if she were alive,” he murmured.

“No! You can’t!” I bawled. “Dad, for heaven’s sake use your head! Why you—Cordelia—Dad, she’d make me call her
Mummy!
”

Now what am I going to do?

I finally killed Lutch Crawford with a pair of bolt-cutters. And there was Lutch—all of him, all his music, his jump, his public and his pride, in the palm of my hand. Literally in the palm of my hand—three pinkish slugs with horn at one end and blood at the other. I tossed ’em, caught ’em, put ’em in my pocket and walked off whistling
Daboo Dabay
, which had been Lutch’s theme. It was the first time in eight years I had heard that music and enjoyed it. Sometimes it takes a long while to kill a man.

I’d tried it twice before. I tried it smart, and failed. I tried it sneak, and failed. Now it’s done.

Whistling it, I can hear the whole band—the brass background: “Hoo Ha Hoo Ha” (how he used to stage that on the stand, the skunk—Lutch, I mean, with the sliphorns and trumpets turning in their chairs, blowing the “hoo” to the right with cap-mutes, swinging around, blowing the “ha” at the left, open) and then Lutch’s clarinet a third above Skid Portly’s gimmicked-up guitar: “Daboo, dabay, dabay daboo …” You know, spotlights on Lutch, a bright overflow of light on Skid and his guitar, light bronzing and scything from the swinging bells of the trombones here and the trumpets over there … the customers ate it up, they loved it, they loved him, the bubbleheaded bunch of bastiches … and Fawn at the piano, white glow from the spot running to her, gold flashes lighting up her face when the brasses swung, lighting up the way she cocked her head to one side, half smiling at Lutch, stroking the keyboard as if it was his face, loving him more than anybody there.

And up in the back, in the dark, out of sight but altogether needed, like a heart, there was always Crispin, crouching over the skins, his bass a thing you felt with your belly rather than heard, but the real beat coming through his hands, pushing out one crushed ruff for
each beat, shifting from center to edge—not much—matching the “hoo ha” of the brass. You couldn’t see Crispin, but you could feel what he made. They loved it. He made love with the skins. He was loving Fawn with the pedal, with the sticks, there in the dark.

And I’d be out front, off to one side, seeing it all, and I can see it now, just whistling the theme. It was all there—Lutch, everything about Lutch, everything that Lutch was. There was the swinging brass, and Crispin loving Fawn, and Fawn loving Lutch, and Lutch giving theme solo to Skid’s guitar, taking the foolish obbligato for himself. And there was Fluke, and that’s me. Sure, in the dark. Always keep Fluke in the dark; don’t show them Fluke’s face. Fluke has a face that kept him out of the United States Army, didn’t you know? Fluke has a mouth only as big as your two thumbnails, and all his teeth are pointed.

I was as much a part of it as any of them, but I didn’t make anything. I just worked there. I was the guy who waited for ten bars of theme, and then coming in with the beat, holding the microphone just off my cheek like a whisper-singer, saying “Lutch is here, Lutch is gone, man, gone.” Lutch used to say old Fluke had a voice like an alto-horn with a split reed. He called it a dirty voice. It was a compliment. “Gone, man, gone,” I’d say, and then talk up: “Top o’ the morn from the top o’ the heap, Kizd. This the Fluke, the fin of the fish, the tail of the whale, bringin’ you much of Lutch and such … Lutch Crawford and his Gone Geese, ladies and gentlemen, from the Ruby Room of the Hotel Halpern in …” (or the Rainbow, or the Angel, or wherever). That was me, Fluke. I hadn’t wanted the buildup, all that jive about “fin and the fish.” That was Lutch’s idea. That was Lutch, like giving his theme solo to Skid’s guitar, instead of taking it himself. He even hauled me into his recording dates—you know that. That was the thing about that band; it was a machine; and some will drive a machine, and some will ride it, and Lutch, he rode.

I
had
to kill him.

I’ll tell you about the time I tried it smart.

Five years ago, it was. We had an ivory man who was pretty good. Name was Hinkle. He arranged a lot—he was the one who styled
the band the way you know it. You can forget him; he was killed. Went down to a dance pitch in the South Side to hear a bass-player who was getting famous, and some drunk started an argument and pulled a gun and missed the cat he aimed at and hit Hinkle. It was none of Hinkle’s argument—he didn’t even know anybody there. Anyway, he got iced and we had to play a date without a piano. We got along, strictly ho-hum.

Then about eleven o’clock this baby shuffles up to the stand, all big eyes and timidity. She pulled Lutch’s swallow-tail between numbers, dropped it like it was hot, and stood there blushing like a radish. She was only about seventeen, cute-fat, with long black hair and pink lips like your kid sister. It took her three tries to lay out what she wanted, but the idea was she played a little piano and thought she might fill out a number for us.

Lutch was always an easy fall for anyone who looked like he wanted something real hard. He didn’t think five seconds. He waved her over to the ivory, and called for “Blue Prelude,” which had enough reed, soon enough, that we could cover the piano if it soured.

We didn’t cover up a thing. The kid played Hinkle, perfect, pure and easy; close your eyes and Hinkle was there, walking bass and third-runs, large as life.

The rest of the date turned over to the kid, far as the band was concerned. She pulled out a bag of tricks that I’ll never forget. She had style and good wrists. She read like lightning and memorized better, and she had a touch. Hell, I don’t have to tell you about Fawn Amory … anyhow, we had a powwow, and Lutch had dinner with her folks. Fawn had every disk Lutch Crawford had ever waxed—that was how she knew Hinkle’s style—and she’d been playing piano since she was a pup. Lutch hired her with her daddy’s blessing, and we had us a piano again.