The Ultimate Egoist (6 page)

“No,” said the cat with equanimity. “But it is just that much more clichéd.”

Ransome laughed. “Quite aside from the fact that you can talk, I find you most refreshing. No one has ever criticized my particular variety of repartee before.”

“No one was ever wise to you before,” said the cat. “Why don’t you like cats?”

A question like that was, to Ransome, the pressing of a button which released ordered phrases. “Cats,” he said oratorically, “are without doubt the most self-centered, ungrateful, hypocritical creatures on this or any other earth. Spawned from a mésalliance between Lilith and Satan—”

Fluffy’s eyes widened. “Ah! An antiquarian!” he whispered.

“—they have the worst traits of both. Their best qualities are their beauty of form and of motion, and even these breathe evil. Women are the ficklest of bipeds, but few women are as fickle as, by nature, any cat is. Cats are not true. They are impossibilities, as perfection is impossible. No other living creature moves with utterly perfect grace. Only the dead can so perfectly relax. And nothing—simply nothing at all—transcends a cat’s incomparable insincerity.”

Fluffy purred.

“Pussy! Sit-by-the-fire and sing!” spat Ransome. “Smiling up all toadying and yellow-eyed at the bearers of liver and salmon and catnip! Soft little puffball, bundle of joy, playing with a ball on a string; making children clap their soft hands to see you, while your mean little brain is viciously alight with the pictures your play calls up for you. Bite it to make it bleed; hold it till it all but throttles; lay it down and step about it daintily; prod it with a gentle silken paw until it moves again, and then pounce. Clasp it in your talons then, lift it, roll over with it, sink your cruel teeth into it while you pump out its guts with your hind feet. Ball on a string! Play-actor!”

Fluffy yawned. “To quote you, that is the prettiest piece of emotional claptrap that these old ears have ever heard. A triumph in studied spontaneity. A symphony in cynicism. A poem in perception. The unqualified—”

Ransome grunted.

He deeply resented this flamboyant theft of all his pet phrases, but his lip twitched nevertheless. The cat was indeed an observant animal.

“—epitome of understatement,” Fluffy finished smoothly. “To listen to you, one would think that you would like to slaughter earth’s felinity.”

“I would,” gritted Ransome.

“It would be a favor to us,” said the cat. “We would keep ourselves vastly amused, eluding you and laughing at the effort it cost you. Humans lack imagination.”

“Superior creature,” said Ransome ironically, “why don’t you do
away with the human race, if you find us a bore?”

“You think we couldn’t?” responded Fluffy. “We can outthink, outrun, and outbreed your kind. But why should we? As long as you act as you have for these last few thousand years, feeding us, sheltering us and asking nothing from us but our presence for purposes of admiration—why then, you may remain here.”

Ransome guffawed. “Nice of you! But listen—stop your bland discussion of the abstract and tell me some things I want to know. How can you talk, and why did you pick me to talk to?”

Fluffy settled himself. “I shall answer the question socratically. Socrates was a Greek, and so I shall begin with your last questions. What do you do for a living?”

“Why I—I have some investments and a small capital, and the interest—” Ransome stopped, for the first time fumbling for words. Fluffy was nodding knowingly.

“All right, all right. Come clean. You can speak freely.”

Ransome grinned. “Well, if you must know—and you seem to—I am a practically permanent house guest. I have a considerable fund of stories and a flair for telling them; I look presentable and act as if I were a gentleman. I negotiate, at times, small loans—”

“A loan,” said Fluffy authoritatively, “is something one intends to repay.”

“We’ll call them loans,” said Ransome airily. “Also, at one time and another, I exact a reasonable fee for certain services rendered—”

“Blackmail,” said the cat.

“Don’t be crude. All in all, I find life a comfortable and engrossing thing.”

“Q.E.D.,” said Fluffy triumphantly. “You make your living being scintillant, beautiful to look at. So do I. You help nobody but yourself; you help yourself to anything you want. So do I. No one likes you except those you bleed; everyone admires and envies you. So with me. Get the point?”

“I think so. Cat, you draw a mean parallel. In other words, you consider my behavior catlike.”

“Precisely,” said Fluffy through his whiskers. “And that is both why and how I can talk with you. You’re so close to the feline in
everything you do and think; your whole basic philosophy is that of a cat. You have a feline aura about you so intense that it contacts mine; hence we find each other intelligible.”

“I don’t understand that,” said Ransome.

“Neither do I,” returned Fluffy. “But there it is. Do you like Mrs. Benedetto?”

“No!” said Ransome immediately and with considerable emphasis. “She is absolutely insufferable. She bores me. She irritates me. She is the only woman in the world who can do both those things to me at the same time. She talks too much. She reads too little. She thinks not at all. Her mind is hysterically hidebound. She has a face like the cover of a book that no one has ever wanted to read. She is built like a pinch-type whiskey bottle that never had any whiskey in it. Her voice is monotonous and unmusical. Her education was insufficient. Her family background is mediocre, she can’t cook, and she doesn’t brush her teeth often enough.”

“My, my,” said the cat, raising both paws in surprise. “I detect a ring of sincerity in all that. It pleases me. That is exactly the way I have felt for some years. I have never found fault with her cooking, though; she buys special food for me. I am tired of it. I am tired of her. I am tired of her to an almost unbelievable extent. Almost as much as I hate you.”

“Me?”

“Of course. You’re an imitation. You’re a phony. Your birth is against you, Ransome. No animal that sweats and shaves, that opens doors for women, that dresses itself in equally phony imitations of the skins of animals, can achieve the status of a cat. You are presumptuous.”

“You’re not?”

“I am different. I am a cat, and have a right to do as I please. I disliked you so intensely when I saw you this evening that I made up my mind to kill you.”

“Why didn’t you? Why—don’t you?”

“I couldn’t,” said the cat coolly. “Not when you sleep like a cat … no, I thought of something far more amusing.”

“Oh?”

“Oh yes.” Fluffy stretched out a foreleg, extended his claws. Ransome noticed subconsciously how long and strong they seemed. The moon had gone its way, and the room was filling with slate-gray light.

“What woke you,” said the cat, leaping to the windowsill, “just before I came in?”

“I don’t know,” said Ransome. “Some little noise, I imagine.”

“No indeed,” said Fluffy, curling his tail and grinning through his whiskers. “It was the stopping of a noise. Notice how quiet it is?”

It was indeed. There wasn’t a sound in the house—oh, yes, now he could hear the plodding footsteps of the maid on her way from the kitchen to Mrs. Benedetto’s bedroom, and the soft clink of a teacup. But otherwise—suddenly he had it. “The old horse stopped snoring!”

“She did,” said the cat. The door across the hall opened, there was the murmur of the maid’s voice, a loud crash, the most horrible scream Ransome had ever heard, pounding footsteps rushing down the hall, a more distant scream, silence. Ransome bounced out of bed. “What the hell—”

“Just the maid,” said Fluffy, washing between his toes, but keeping the corners of his eyes on Ransome. “She just found Mrs. Benedetto.”

“Found—”

“Yes. I tore her throat out.”

“Good—God! Why?”

Fluffy poised himself on the windowsill. “So you’d be blamed for it,” he said, and laughing nastily, he leaped out and disappeared in the gray morning.

O
NCE UPON A TIME
, when the world was younger than it will be, and a little more foolish, there appeared a Leader. He was, in his prime, the unquestioned master of his land, and the force of his mind and of the thousands of fools who served him stilled all murmurs of reprisal. He gained his power by suasion and held it by bloodshed, and he throttled his people and by doing so deified them. That they must believe; for that was the only justification they had, poor things, to tell themselves …

Now the Leader appeared before his people one day, to frighten and praise them, and a missile came from the crowd and killed one of his ministers. This happening frightened the Leader, and he began to think how terrible it would be for him to be killed. He was a great power in the world, this Leader, and the masses he controlled were also a great power. But the power of those masses sprang from him, and he knew that if he were dead, then the masses would not be as they were. Some other leader would come forward and destroy his work, and worse, his name and fame and memory. He gave deep thought to this matter, and decided that he must have a servant that resembled him in every way, so that at no time would anyone know whether it was the Leader that faced the people, or his substitute. It was a pleasing plan, and he instituted a great and secret search through the land for such a servant.

It was hard. The details of that vast and quiet search are one of the most monumental stories ever to write its dark lines on the pages of history. But in months the thing was done, and the man was presented to the Leader.

He was perfect. Nearly every line of his face, every tone of his voice, every gesture, was that of his Leader. He knew the Leader’s ways, too, and the Leader’s thought. The Leader himself taught him
what details he lacked, in many secret conferences held in the Leader’s rooms in the dead of night, with but one trusted sentry guarding the double doors.

There came a time when the Leader fell deathly sick from a malignance in his throat. He sent an urgent, secret message to the royal physician of a rival country’s King, and the physician refused to come. For had the Leader died under the knife, the physician never would have left those rooms alive.

But the Leader did not die. One was found to cure him, an old wise man whose only thought was for gain, and it was done, and forgotten. He did not die, but while he was sick, something worse than death happened to the Leader. It was his man, his perfect prototype.

He was
too
perfect.

While the Leader lay abed, his great organization had gone on its way unchecked, unhampered by his illness. His man had stepped in to fill his place, and had done it so perfectly that no one knew—no one ever knew. There had been four momentous decisions then, too, and the man had handled them well, even as he would have. Too perfectly.

The Leader began to look askance at this man. Suppose he, the Leader, were to be killed now, tomorrow, quietly? He would be a nameless corpse, and thereafter the memories of man would record doings that were not his, but those of another. The Leader was a god. His people spoke of him as a god—because they must; yet they spoke of him so, and such speech was necessary to him, as worship is necessary to the perpetuation of any god …

And so it came about that a god knew the meaning of fear. Fear was hate, and hate was anger. The man must be killed.

The killing happened sooner than the Leader had expected. It was on a night shortly after the Leader had bloodlessly invaded a part of a neighboring land. He was, with his men’s help, drawing up a promise to the world that he would take no more from that or any other neighbor.

And his man had the impertinence to disagree! It was the first time, and the Leader was frightened and filled with hate and anger
towards him. The man said that there should be more such invasions, and more, and more, until the Leader’s country not only had what territories she had lost to other lands in her stormy past, but had yet more and more, until she dominated a continent and then a world. The man gave reasons, too, and they were good. But in his stubborn anger, the Leader pretended to scoff, and the man caught the shifty glint of his eyes as he pawed a side-arm from his belt. The man, since he was dressed exactly like the Leader, also had a side-arm, and both weapons came up together. One man was a little faster.

The sentry outside heard a sound that meant death, and he flung open the double doors. He saw two men, identical in build, in garb, in hate-filled countenance. As he watched, one of the men slumped dead to the floor. The other shrugged, put away his weapon, and gave orders that the dead man was to be removed and disposed of, most secretly.

There followed a reign of terror and triumph, as the forces of the Leader swept south and east, taking country after country, land after land of their ancient possessions. Every nation was defied, every nation was cowed, and the land of the Leader stood in its prime, unconquerable, threatening.

Then there was the great fall. The trusted sentry betrayed his trust one day, and whispered a suspicion. His words became a murmur, a shout, and then a battle cry. The Leader is dead!
The Leader is dead!

The man who called himself, then, the Leader, answered bloodily, and killed many of those that dared to use that battle cry. But for every one he killed, there were ten, a thousand, a million there to take it up. The government was overthrown, and starving people rejoiced, and nations that strained to attack drew back and watched the death of a régime.

And the man who had been the Leader? His was the most agonizing death, for they did not kill him. They laughed at his furious impotence, and they turned him loose in the streets, quietly, so that he would not be known and so would live to suffer.

Torture. The humiliation that man bore, walking the streets, hearing his name tossed about lightly, is beyond description. He had no
friends, for he knew how to provoke no human emotion but fear and its child, hate.

He nearly starved, and then one day found a man who wanted gain, who saw in him a means for gain. It was the old wise man who had cured the Leader of his illness. The starving beggar found this man, and gave him certain proofs, and the address of the cellar where he skulked. The physician passed quietly about, here and there, in the right places, and said what was necessary. It took a very long time, and all the while, the beggar lay in his cellar. He began to think he had been forgotten, and the infrequent gibes that echoed down to him from the street began to drive him quite, quite mad.