The Very Best of F & SF v1 (5 page)

“But no,” she
said, surprised in spite of herself. “I mean, I
couldn’t.”

“Please do not
interrupt,” Mr. Johnson told her. “And
here”
he said to the young man, “this will take care of
you”
The young man accepted
the bill dazedly, but said, “Probably counterfeit,” to the young woman out of
the side of his mouth. “Now,” Mr. Johnson went on, disregarding the young man, “what
is your name, miss?”

“Kent,” she said
helplessly. “Mildred Kent.”

“Fine,” said Mr.
Johnson. “And you, sir?”

“Arthur Adams,” said
the young man stiffly.

“Splendid,” said
Mr. Johnson. “Now, Miss Kent, I would like you to meet Mr. Adams. Mr. Adams,
Miss Kent.”

Miss Kent
stared, wet her lips nervously, made a gesture as though she might run, and
said, “How do you do?”

Mr. Adams
straightened his shoulders, scowled at Mr. Johnson, made a gesture as though he
might run, and said, “How do you do?”

“Now
this”
said Mr. Johnson,
taking several bills from his wallet, “should be enough for the day for both of
you. I would suggest, perhaps, Coney Island—although I personally am not fond
of the place—or perhaps a nice lunch somewhere, and dancing, or a matinee, or
even a movie, although take care to choose a really
good
one; there are
so
many bad movies these
days. You might,” he said, struck with an inspiration, “visit the Bronx Zoo, or
the Planetarium. Anywhere, as a matter of fact,” he concluded, “that you would
like to go. Have a nice time.”

As he started to
move away, Arthur Adams, breaking from his dumbfounded stare, said, “But see
here, mister, you
can’t
do this. Why—how do you know—I mean, we don’t even know—I mean, how
do you know we won’t just take the money and not do what you said?”

“You’ve taken
the money,” Mr. Johnson said. “You don’t have to follow any of my suggestions.
You may know something you prefer to do—perhaps a museum, or something.”

“But suppose I
just run away with it and leave her here?”

“I know you won’t,”
said Mr. Johnson gently, “because you remembered to ask
me
that. Goodbye,” he
added, and went on.

As he stepped up
the street, conscious of the sun on his head and his good shoes, he heard from
somewhere behind him the young man saying, “Look, you know you don’t
have
to if you don’t want
to,” and the girl saying, “But unless you don’t want to...” Mr. Johnson smiled
to himself and then thought that he had better hurry along; when he wanted to
he could move very quickly, and before the young woman had gotten around to
saying, “Well,
I
will if
you
will,” Mr. Johnson was several blocks away and had already stopped
twice, once to help a lady lift several large packages into a taxi and once to
hand a peanut to a seagull. By this time he was in an area of large stores and
many more people and he was buffeted constantly from either side by people
hurrying and cross and late and sullen. Once he offered a peanut to a man who
asked him for a dime, and once he offered a peanut to a bus driver who had
stopped his bus at an intersection and had opened the window next to his seat
and put out his head as though longing for fresh air and the comparative quiet
of the traffic. The man wanting a dime took the peanut because Mr. Johnson had
wrapped a dollar bill around it, but the bus driver took the peanut and asked
ironically, “You want a transfer, Jack?”

On a busy corner
Mr. Johnson encountered two young people—for one minute he thought they might
be Mildred Kent and Arthur Adams—who were eagerly scanning a newspaper, their
backs pressed against a storefront to avoid the people passing, their heads
bent together. Mr. Johnson, whose curiosity was insatiable, leaned onto the
storefront next to them and peeked over the man’s shoulder; they were scanning
the “Apartments Vacant” columns.

Mr. Johnson
remembered the street where the woman and her little boy were going to Vermont
and he tapped the man on the shoulder and said amiably, “Try down on West
Seventeen. About the middle of the block, people moved out this morning.”

“Say, what do
you—” said the man, and then, seeing Mr. Johnson clearly, “Well, thanks. Where
did you say?”

“West Seventeen,”
said Mr. Johnson. “About the middle of the block.” He smiled again and said, “Good
luck.”

“Thanks,” said
the man.

“Thanks,” said
the girl, as they moved off.

“Goodbye,” said Mr.
Johnson.

He lunched alone
in a pleasant restaurant, where the food was rich, and only Mr. Johnson’s
excellent digestion could encompass two of their whipped-cream-and-chocolate-and-rum-cake
pastries for dessert. He had three cups of coffee, tipped the waiter largely,
and went out into the street again into the wonderful sunlight, his shoes still
comfortable and fresh on his feet. Outside he found a beggar staring into the
windows of the restaurant he had left and, carefully looking through the money
in his pocket, Mr. Johnson approached the beggar and pressed some coins and a
couple of bills into his hand. “It’s the price of the veal cutlet lunch plus
tip,” said Mr. Johnson. “Goodbye.”

After his lunch
he rested; he walked into the nearest park and fed peanuts to the pigeons. It
was late afternoon by the time he was ready to start back downtown, and he had
refereed two checker games and watched a small boy and girl whose mother had
fallen asleep and awakened with surprise and fear which turned to amusement
when she saw Mr. Johnson. He had given away almost all of his candy, and had
fed all the rest of his peanuts to the pigeons, and it was time to go home.
Although the late afternoon sun was pleasant, and his shoes were still entirely
comfortable, he decided to take a taxi downtown.

He had a
difficult time catching a taxi, because he gave up the first three or four
empty ones to people who seemed to need them more; finally, however, he stood
alone on the corner and—almost like netting a frisky fish—he hailed desperately
until he succeeded in catching a cab which had been proceeding with haste
uptown and seemed to draw in towards Mr. Johnson against its own will.

“Mister,” the
cab driver said as Mr. Johnson climbed in, “I figured you was an omen, like. I
wasn’t going to pick you up at all.”

“Kind of you,” said
Mr. Johnson ambiguously.

“If I’d of let
you go it would of cost me ten bucks,” said the driver.

“Really?” said
Mr. Johnson.

“Yeah,” said the
driver. “Guy just got out of the cab, he turned around and give me ten bucks,
said take this and bet it in a hurry on a horse named Vulcan, right away.”

“Vulcan?” said
Mr. Johnson, horrified. “A fire sign on a Wednesday?”

“What?” said the
driver. “Anyway, I said to myself if I got no fare between here and there I’d
bet the ten, but if anyone looked like they needed the cab I’d take it as an
omen and I’d take the ten home to the wife.”

“You were very
right,” said Mr. Johnson heartily. “This is Wednesday, you would have lost your
money. Monday, yes, or even Saturday. But never never never a fire sign on a
Wednesday. Sunday would have been good, now.”

“Vulcan don’t
run on Sunday,” said the driver.

“You wait till
another day,” said Mr. Johnson. “Down this street, please, driver. I’ll get off
on the next corner.”

“He
told
me Vulcan, though,” said
the driver.

“I’ll tell you,”
said Mr. Johnson, hesitating with the door of the cab half open. “You take that
ten dollars and I’ll give you another ten dollars to go with it, and you go
right ahead and bet that money on any Thursday on any horse that has a name
indicating... let me see, Thursday... well, grain. Or any growing food.”

“Grain?” said
the driver. “You mean a horse named, like, Wheat or something?”

“Certainly,” said
Mr. Johnson. “Or, as a matter of fact, to make it even easier, any horse whose
name includes the letters C, R, L. Perfectly simple.”

“Tall corn?”
said the driver, a light in his eye. “You mean a horse named, like, Tall Corn?”

“Absolutely,” said
Mr. Johnson. “Here’s your money.”

“Tall Corn,” said
the driver. “Thank
you,
mister.”

“Goodbye,” said
Mr. Johnson.

He was on his
own corner and went straight up to his apartment. He let himself in and called “Hello?”
and Mrs. Johnson answered from the kitchen, “Hello, dear, aren’t you early?”

“Took a taxi
home,” Mr. Johnson said. “I remembered the cheesecake, too. What’s for dinner?”

Mrs. Johnson
came out of the kitchen and kissed him; she was a comfortable woman, and
smiling as Mr. Johnson smiled. “Hard day?” she asked.

“Not very,” said
Mr. Johnson, hanging his coat in the closet. “How about you?

“So-so,” she
said. She stood in the kitchen doorway while he settled into his easy chair and
took off his good shoes and took out the paper he had bought that morning. “Here
and there,” she said.

“I didn’t do so
badly,” Mr. Johnson said. “Couple young people.”

“Fine,” she
said. “I had a little nap this afternoon, took it easy most of the day. Went
into a department store this morning and accused the woman next to me of
shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her up. Sent three dogs to the
pound—
you
know, the usual thing. Oh, and listen,” she added, remembering.

“What?” asked
Mr. Johnson.

“Well,” she
said, “I got onto a bus and asked the driver for a transfer, and when he helped
someone else first I said that he was impertinent, and quarreled with him. And
then I said why wasn’t he in the army, and I said it loud enough for everyone
to hear, and I took his number and I turned in a complaint. Probably got him
fired.”

“Fine,” said Mr.
Johnson. “But you do look tired. Want to change over tomorrow?”

“I
would
like
to,” she said. “I could
do with a change.”

“Right,” said
Mr. Johnson. “What’s for dinner?”

“Veal cutlet.”

“Had it for
lunch,” said Mr. Johnson.

Return to Table of
Contents

Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) published
a story in our first issue and a tale of his appeared posthumously in our
fiftieth anniversary issue. In between, about a dozen of his beautiful,
well-crafted tales about love, alienation, and syzygy graced our pages. For our
thirtieth anniversary, we surveyed our readers and Mr. Sturgeon’s “And Now the
News...” proved to be one of our most popular stories, but for this anthology,
I felt “A Touch of Strange” was a better fit.

He
left his
clothes in the car and slipped down to
the beach.

Moonrise, she’d said.

He glanced at
the eastern horizon and was informed of nothing. It was a night to drink the
very airglow, and the stars lay lightless like scattered talc on the
background.

“Moonrise,” he
muttered.

Easy enough for
her. Moonrise was something, in her cosmos, that one simply knew about. He’d
had to look it up. You don’t realize—certainly
she’d
never realize—how
hard it is, when you don’t know anything about it, to find out exactly what
time moonrise is supposed to be, at the dark of the moon. He still wasn’t
positive, so he’d come early, and would wait.

He shuffled down
to the whispering water, finding it with ears and toes. “Woo.” Catch m’ death,
he thought. But it never occurred to him to keep
her
waiting. It wasn’t in
her to understand human frailties.

He glanced once
again at the sky, then waded in and gave himself to the sea. It was chilly, but
by the time he had taken ten of the fine strong strokes which had first
attracted her, he felt wonderful. He thought, oh well, by the time I’ve learned
to breathe under water, it should be no trick at all to find moonrise without
an almanac.

He struck out
silently for blackened and broken teeth of rock they call Harpy’s Jaw, with
their gums of foam and the floss of tide-risen weed bitten up and hung for the
birds to pick. It was oily calm everywhere but by the Jaw, which mumbled and
munched on every wave and spit the pieces into the air. He was therefore very
close before he heard the singing. What with the surf and his concentration on
flanking the Jaw without cracking a kneecap the way he had that first time, he
was in deep water on the seaward side before he noticed the new quality in the
singing: Delighted he trod water and listened to be sure; and sure enough, he
was right.

It sounded
terrible.

“Get your flukes
out of your mouth,” he bellowed joyfully, “you baggy old guano-guzzler.”

“You don’t sound
so hot yourself, chum,” came the shrill falsetto answer, “and you know what
type fish-gut
chum
I mean.”

He swam closer.
Oh, this was fine. It wasn’t easy to find a for-real something like this to
clobber her with. Mostly, she was so darn perfect, he had to make it up whole,
like the time he told her her eyes weren’t the same color. Imagine, he thought,
they
get head-colds too!
And then he thought, well, why not? “You mind your big bony bottom-feeding
mouth,” he called cheerfully, “or I’ll curry your tail with a scaling-tool.” He
could barely make her out, sprawled on the narrow seaward ledge—something
piebald dark in the darkness. “Was that really you singin’ or are you sitting
on a blowfish?”

“You creak no
better’n a straight-gut skua gull in a sewer sump,” she cried raucously. “Whyn’cha
swallow that sea-slug or spit it out, one?”

“Ah, go soak
your head in a paddlewheel,” he laughed. He got a hand on the ledge and heaved
himself out of the water. Instantly there was a high-pitched squeak and a
clumsy splash, and she was gone. The particolored mass of shadow-in-shade had
passed him in mid-air too swiftly for him to determine just what it was, but he
knew with a shocked certainty what it was not.

He wiggled a
bare
(i.e.,
mere) buttock-clutch on the short narrow shell of rock and leaned
over as far as he could to peer into the night-stained sea. In a moment there
was a feeble commotion and then a bleached oval so faint that he must avert his
eyes two points to leeward like a sailor seeing a far light, to make it out at
all. Again, seeing virtually nothing, he could be sure of the things it was
not. That close cap of darkness, night or no night, was not the web of floating
gold for which he had once bought a Florentine comb. Those two dim blotches
were not the luminous, over-long, wide-spaced (almost side-set) green eyes
which, laughing, devoured his sleep. Those hints of shoulders were not broad
and fair, but slender. That salt-spasmed weak sobbing cough was unlike any
sound he had heard on these rocks before; and the (by this time) unnecessary
final proof was the narrow hand he reached for and grasped. It was delicate,
not splayed; it was unwebbed; its smoothness was that of the plum and not the
articulated magic of a fine-wrought golden watchband. It was, in short, human,
and for a long devastated moment their hands clung together while their minds,
in panic, prepared to do battle with the truth. At last they said in unison, “But
you’re not—”

And let a wave
pass, and chorused, “I didn’t know there was anybod—” And opened and closed
their mouths, and said together, “Y’see, I was waiting for—”

“Look!” he said
abruptly, because he had found something he could say that she couldn’t at the
moment. “Get a good grip, I’ll pull you out. Ready? One, two—”

“No!” she said,
outraged, and pulled back abruptly. He lost her hand, and down she went in
mid-gasp, and up she came strangling. He reached down to help, and missed,
though he brushed her arm. “Don’t touch me!” she cried, and doggy-paddled
frantically to the rock on which he sat, and got a hand on it. She hung there
coughing until he stirred, whereupon: “Don’t touch me!” she cried again.

“Well all right,”
he said in an injured tone. She said, aloud but obviously to herself, “Oh,
dear...”
Somehow this made
him want to explain himself. “I only thought you should come out, coughing like
that, I mean it’s silly you should be bobbing around in the water and I’m
sitting up here on the...” He started a sentence about he was only trying to
be... and another about he was
not
trying to be... and was unable to finish either. They stared at one
another, two panting sightless blots on a spume-slick rock.

“The way I was
talking before, you’ve got to understand—” They stopped as soon as they
realized they were in chorus again. In a sudden surge of understanding he
laughed—it was like relief—and said, “You mean that you’re not the kind of girl
who talks the way you were talking just before I got here. I believe you... And
I’m not the kind of guy who does it either. I thought you were a—thought you
were someone else, that’s all. Come on out. I won’t touch you.”

“Well...”

“I’m still
waiting for the—for my friend. That’s all.”

“Well...”

A wave came and
she took sudden advantage of it and surged upward, falling across the ledge on
her stomach. “I’ll manage, I’ll manage,” she said rapidly, and did. He stayed
where he was. They stayed where they were in the hollow of the rock, out of the
wind, four feet apart, in darkness so absolute that the red of tight-closed
eyes was a lightening.

She said, “Uh...”
and then sat silently masticating something she wanted to say, and swallowing
versions of it. At last: “I’m not trying to be nosy.”

“I didn’t think
you... Nosy? You haven’t asked me anything.”

“I mean staying
here,” she said primly. “I’m not just trying to be in the way, I mean. I mean,
I’m waiting for someone too.”

“Make yourself
at home,” he said expansively, and then felt like a fool. He was sure he had
sounded cynical, sarcastic, and unbelieving. Her protracted silence made it
worse. It became unbearable. There was only one thing he could think of to say,
but he found himself unaccountably reluctant to bring out into the open the
only possible explanation for her presence here. His mouth asked (as it were)
while he wasn’t watching it, inanely, “Is your uh friend coming out in uh a
boat?”

“Is yours?” she
asked shyly; and suddenly they were laughing together like a brace of loons. It
was one of those crazy sessions people will at times find themselves
conducting, laughing explosively, achingly, without a specific punchline over
which to hang the fabric of the situation. When it had spent itself, they sat
quietly. They had not moved nor exchanged anything, and yet they now sat
together, and not merely side-by-side. The understood attachment to
someone—something—else had paradoxically dissolved a barrier between them.

It was she who
took the plunge, exposed the Word, the code attachment by which they might
grasp and handle their preoccupation. She said, dreamily, “I never saw a
mermaid.”

And he
responded, quite as dreamily but instantly too: “Beautiful.” And that was
question and answer. And when he said, “I never saw a—” she said immediately, “Beautiful.”
And that was reciprocity. They looked at each other again in the dark and
laughed, quietly this time.

After a friendly
silence, she asked, “What’s her name?”

He snorted in
self-surprise. “Why, I don’t know. I really don’t. When I’m away from her I
think of her as
she
, and when I’m with her she’s just..
. you.
Not you,” he added
with a childish giggle.

She gave him
back the giggle and then sobered reflectively. “Now that’s the strangest thing.
I don’t know
his
name either. I don’t even know if they have names.”

“Maybe they don’t
need them. She—uh—they’re sort of different, if you know what I mean. I mean,
they know things we don’t know, sort of... feel them. Like if people are coming
to the beach, long before they’re in sight. And what the weather will be like,
and where to sit behind a rock on the bottom of the sea so a fish swims right
into their hands.”

“And what time’s
moonrise.”

“Yes,” he said,
thinking, you suppose they know each other? you think they’re out there in the
dark watching? you suppose
he’ll
come
first, and what will he say to me? Or what if
she
comes first?

“I don’t think
they need names,” the girl was saying. “They know one person from another, or
just who they’re talking about, by the feel of it. What’s your name?”

“John Smith,” he
said. “Honest to God.”

She was silent,
and then suddenly giggled.

He made a
questioning sound.

“I bet you say ‘Honest
to God’ like that every single time you tell anyone your name. I bet you’ve
said it thousands and thousands of times,” she said.

“Well, yes.
Nobody ever noticed it before, though.”

“I would. My
name is Jane Dow. Dee owe doubleyou, not Doe.”

“Jane Dow. Oh!
and you have to spell it out like that every single time?”

“Honest to God,”
she said, and they laughed.

He said, “John
Smith, Jane Dow. Golly. Pretty ordinary people.”

“Ordinary. You
and your mermaid.”

He wished he
could see her face. He wondered if the merpeople were as great a pressure on
her as they were on him. He had never told a soul about it—who’d listen?

Who’d believe?
Or, listening, believing, who would not interfere? Such a wonder... and had she
told all her girlfriends and boyfriends and the boss and whatnot? He doubted
it. He could not have said why, but he doubted it.

“Ordinary,” he
said assertively, “yes.” And he began to talk, really talk about it because he
had not, because he had to. “That has a whole lot to do with it. Well, it has
everything to do with it. Look, nothing ever happened in my whole entire life.
Know what I mean? I mean, nothing. I never skipped a grade in school and I
never got left back. I never won a prize. I never broke a bone. I was never
rich and never hungry. I got a job and kept it and I won’t ever go very high in
the company and I won’t ever get canned. You know what I mean?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So then,” he
said exultantly, “along comes this mermaid. I mean, to
me
comes a mermaid. Not
just a glimpse, no maybe I did and maybe I didn’t see a mermaid: this is a real
live mermaid who wants me back again, time and again, and makes dates and keeps
’em too, for all she’s all the time late.”

“So is
he”
she said in intense
agreement.

“What I call it,”
he said, leaning an inch closer and lowering his voice confidentially, “is a
touch of strange. A touch of strange. I mean, that’s what I call it to myself,
you see? I mean, a person is a person all his life, he’s good to his mother, he
never gets arrested, if he drinks too much he doesn’t get in trouble he just
gets, excuse the expression, sick to his stomach. He does a day’s good work for
a day’s pay and nobody hates him or, for that matter, nobody likes him either.
Now a man like that has no
life;
what I mean, he isn’t
real.
But just take an ordinary guy-by-the-millions like that, and add a
touch of strange, you see? Some little something he does, or has, or that
happens to him, even once. Then for all the rest of his life he’s
real.
Golly. I talk too
much.”