The Ultimate Egoist (25 page)

And in the apartment, Selma stirred in her sleep, coughed violently, gasped once or twice and settled down into a still deeper sleep.

Bert was going over the day’s business, trying to get his mind attuned to it. But something seemed to be in the way, like a haunting tune he couldn’t quite remember; like a face casually seen which plagues one all day. He tried to put the impression out of his mind, and couldn’t. Something was wrong … something—

(In the apartment, escaping gas hissed on and on …)

“Go back … go back … go back …” Bert shook his head sharply. He could have sworn he heard a voice.

“Bert! Bert! Oh, Bert …” It beat inside his brain, clear and tiny—Selma’s voice! He leaned forward, tapping the driver on the shoulder. “Did you hear something, Buddy?”

“No—what?”

“Turn around,” snapped Bert. “Back to the Winfred—and hurry!”

Tires screamed as the cab took the U-turn on two wheels, scuttled back up the avenue. Bert almost told the man to head downtown again, and then leaned back in his seat. He didn’t know whether to curse himself for a fool or to begin thinking about nervous breakdowns. Only one thing was clear—he had to get back to the Winfred, and he had to get there in a hurry.

(Selma was there. She lay very quiet …)

The cab stopped for a light. “Take a chance on it,” Bert gritted. “If you get a ticket I’ll make good.” The driver did not hesitate. Never, in all his years of hurrying frantic people from one place to another around the city, had he met such urgency, such hysterical
haste, in a fare. This one looked as if he could pay—what could the driver lose? He ground into gear, hurled the cab across traffic.

Cutting in and out, blasting trucks and cars out of the way with horn and vocal cords, the driver did his utmost to push the accelerator through the floor. Bert, white, tense, sat on the edge of his seat, his eyes straining ahead. Why, he would never know, but he was frightened. He noticed the voice again, not because he heard it but because he suddenly stopped hearing it.

The cab hooted up to the Winfred’s marquee and Bert was out and up the steps before it stopped, leaving the cabby gloating over a nice, crisp twenty. Bert threw himself into the elevator and cursed it roundly as it crawled interminably to the twelfth floor. Gasping with effort and nervous tension, he finally reached his door, fumbled for his key, fumbled for the keyhole, flung the door open. Gas!

He ran to the stove, turned it off. Now; there’s your example. I know those folks; it’s a true story. What? Selma? Why, sure she was all right. Why shouldn’t she be? That ritzy little place was air-conditioned; she could have slept there all day with all the jets on and lived through it. I’m talking about telepathy, not gas!

D
ID YOU SEE
this in the papers?

I can clear up that mystery.

It started well over a year ago, when I was developing my new flexible glass. It would have made me rich, but—well, I’d rather be poor and happy.

That glass was really something. I’d hit on it when I was fooling with a certain mineral salt—never mind the name of it. I wouldn’t want anyone to start fooling with it and get himself into the same kind of jam that I did. But the idea was that if a certain complex sulphide of silicon is combined with this salt at a certain temperature, and the product is carefully annealed, you get that glass. Inexpensive, acid-proof, and highly flexible. Nice. But one of its properties—wait till I tell you about that.

The day it all started, I had just finished my first bottle. It was standing on the annealer—a rig of my own design; a turntable, shielded, over a ring of Bunsen burners—cooling slowly while I was turning a stopper from the same material on my lathe. I had to step the lathe up to twenty-two thousand before I could cut the stuff, and Helix was fascinated by the whine of it. He always like to watch me work, anyway. He was my cat, and more. He was my friend. I had no secrets from Helix.

Ah, he was a cat. A big black tom, with a white throat and white mittens, and a tail twice as long as that of an ordinary cat. He carried it in a graceful spiral—three complete turns—and hence his name. He could sit on one end of that tail and take two turns around his head with the other. Ah, he was a cat.

I took the stopper off the lathe and lifted the top of the annealer to drop it into the mouth of the bottle. And as I did so—
whht!

Ever hear a bullet ricochet past your ear? It was like that. I heard it, and then the stopper, which I held poised over the rotating bottle, was whipped out of my hand and jammed fast on the bottle mouth. And all the flames went out—
blown
out! I stood there staring at Helix, and noticed one thing more:

He hadn’t moved!

Now you know and I know that a cat—any cat—can’t resist that short, whistling noise. Try it, if you have a cat. When Helix should have been on all fours, big yellow eyes wide, trying to find out where the sound came from, he was sitting sphinxlike, with his eyes closed, his whiskers twitching slightly, and his front paws turned under his forelegs. It didn’t make sense. Helix’s senses were unbelievably acute—I knew. I’d tested them. Then—

Either I had heard that noise with some sense that Helix didn’t possess, or I hadn’t heard it at all. If I hadn’t, then I was crazy. No one likes to think he is crazy. So you can’t blame me for trying to convince myself that it was a sixth sense.

Helix roused me by sneezing. I took his cue and turned off the gas.

“Helix, old fellow,” I said when I could think straight, “what do you make of this? Hey?”

Helix made an inquiring sound and came over to rub his head on my sleeve. “Got you stopped too, has it?” I scratched him behind the ear, and the end of his tail curled ecstatically around my wrist. “Let’s see. I hear a funny noise. You don’t. Something snatches the stopper out of my hand, and a wind comes from where it’s impossible for any wind to be, and blows out the burners. Does that make sense?” Helix yawned. “I don’t think so either. Tell me, Helix, what shall we do about this? Hey?”

Helix made no suggestion. I imagine he was quite ready to forget about it. Now, I wish I had.

I shrugged my shoulders and went back to work. First I slipped a canvas glove on and lifted the bottle off the turntable. Helix slid under my arm and made as if to smell the curved, flexible surface. I made a wild grab to keep him from burning his nose, ran my bare hand up against the bottle, and then had to make another grab to keep it off the floor. I missed with the second grab—the bottle struck dully, bounced, and—landed right back on the bench? Not only on it, but in the exact spot from which I had knocked it!

And—get this, now—when I looked at my hand to see how big my hypothetical seared spot might be, it wasn’t there! That bottle was
cold
—and it should have been hot for hours yet! My new glass was a very poor conductor. I almost laughed. I should have realized that Helix had more sense than to put his pink nose against the bottle if it were hot.

Helix and I got out of there. We went into my room, closed the door on that screwy bottle, and flopped down on the bed. It was too much for us. We would have wept aloud purely for self-expression, if we hadn’t forgotten how, years ago, Helix and I.

After my nerves had quieted a bit, I peeped into the laboratory.

“Come on in here, you dope. I want to talk to you.”

Who said that?
I look suspiciously at Helix, who, in all innocence, returned my puzzled gaze. Well, I hadn’t said it. Helix hadn’t. I began to be suspicious as hell of that bottle.

“Well?”

The tone was drawling and not a little pugnacious. I looked at Helix. Helix was washing daintily. But—Helix was the best watchdog of a cat that ever existed. If there had been anyone else—if he had
heard
anyone else—in the lab, he’d have let me know. Then he hadn’t heard. And I had. “Helix,” I breathed—and he looked right up at me, so there was nothing wrong with his hearing—“we’re both crazy.”

“No, you’re not,” said the voice. “Sit down before you fall down. I’m in your bottle, and I’m in to stay. You’ll kill me if you take me out—but just between you and me I don’t think you can get me out. Anyway please don’t try … what’s the matter with you? Stop popping your eyes, man!”

“Oh,” I said hysterically, “there’s nothing the matter with me. No, no, no. I’m nuts, that’s all. Stark, totally, and completely nuts, balmy, mentally unbalanced, and otherwise the victim of a psychic loss of equilibrium. Me, I’m a raving lunatic. I hear voices. What does that make me, Joan of Arc? Hey, Helix. Look at me. I’m Joan of Arc. You must be Beucephalus, or Pegasus, or the great god Pasht. First I have an empty bottle, and next thing I know it’s full of djinn. Hey, Helix, have a lil drink of djinn …” I sat down on the floor and Helix sat beside me. I think he was sorry for me. I know I was—very.

“Very funny,” said the bottle—or rather, the voice that claimed it was from the bottle. “If you’ll only give me a chance to explain, now—”

“Look,” I said, “maybe there is a voice. I don’t trust anything any more—except you, Helix. I know. If you can hear him, then I’m sane. If not, I’m crazy. Hey, Voice!”

“Well?”

“Look, do me a favor. Holler ‘Helix’ a couple of times. If the cat hears you, I’m sane.”

“All right,” the voice said wearily. “Helix! Here, Helix!”

Helix sat there and looked at me. Not by the flicker of a whisker did he show that he had heard. I drew a deep breath and said softly, “Helix! Here, Helix!”

Helix jumped up on my chest, put one paw on each shoulder, and tickled my nose with his curving tail. I got up carefully, holding Helix. “Pal,” I said, “I guess this is the end of you and me. I’m nuts, pal. Better go phone the police.”

Helix purred. He could see I was sad about something, but what it was didn’t seem to bother him any. He was looking at me as if my being a madman didn’t make him like me any the less. But I think he found it interesting. He had a sort of quizzical look in his glowing eyes. As if he’d rather I stuck around. Well, if he wouldn’t phone the law, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t responsible for myself any more.

“Now,
will
you shut up?” said the bottle. “I don’t want to give you any trouble. You may not realize it, but you saved my life. Don’t be scared. Look. I’m a soul, see? I was a man called Gregory—Wallace Gregory. I was killed in an automobile accident two hours ago—”

“You were killed two hours ago. And I just saved your life. You know, Gregory, that’s just dandy. On my head you will find a jewelled turban. I am now the Maharajah of Mysore. Goo. Da. And flub. I—”

“You are perfectly sane. That is, you are right now. Get hold of yourself and you’ll be all right,” said the bottle. “Yes, I was killed. My body was killed. I’m a soul. The automobile couldn’t kill that. But They could.”

“They?”

“Yeah. The Ones who were chasing me when I got into your bottle.”

“Who are They?”

“We have no name for Them. They eat souls. There are swarms of Them. Any time They find a soul running around loose, They track it down.”

“You mean—any time anyone dies, his soul wanders around, running away from Them? And that sooner or later, They catch it?”

“Oh, no. Only some souls. You see, when a man realizes he is going to die, something happens to his soul. There are some people alive today who knew, at one time, that they were about to die. Then, by some accident, they didn’t. Those people are never quite the same afterward, because that something has happened. With the realization of impending death, a soul gets what might be called a protective covering, though it’s more like a change of form. From then on, the soul is inedible and undesirable to Them.”

“What happens to a protected soul, then?”

“That I don’t know. It’s funny … people have been saying for millennia that if only someone could come back from death, what strange things he could relate … well, I did it, thanks to you. And yet I know very little more about it than you. True, I died, and my soul left my body. But then, I only went a very little way. A protected soul probably goes through stage after stage … I don’t know. Now, I’m just guessing.”

“Why wasn’t your soul ‘protected’?”

“Because I had no warning—no realization that I was to die. It happened so quickly. And I haven’t been particularly religious. Religious people, and freethinkers if they think deeply, and philosophers in general, and people whose work brings them in touch with deep and great things—these may all be immune from Them, years before they die.”

“Why?”

“That should be obvious. You can’t think deeply without running up against a realization of the power of death. ‘Realization’ is a loose term, I know. If your mind is brilliant, and you don’t pursue your subject—
any
subject—deeply enough, you will never reach that realization. It’s a sort of dead end to a questioning mind—a
ne plus ultra
. Batter yourself against it, and it hurts. And that pain is the realization. Stupid people reach it far easier than others—it hurts more, and they are made immune easier. But at any rate, a man can live his life without it, and still have a few seconds just before he dies for his soul to undergo the immunizing change. I didn’t have those few seconds.”