The Tehama and others Page 10

  *

  It was not difficult, he discovered, to delimit the area to which he gave Fido access; it required no more conscious effort than the act of walking, say. He found the fact to be of considerable comfort.

  Fido completed his research and said, "You are right. We cannot begin until there is plenty of money, and you have almost none. Gambling, I should think, would be the simplest beginning. Let me make an examination of gambling." He did so, and continued: "We will place a wager on a number with your friend at the liquor store. The number that will win today is 112."

  Barley did not feel greatly astonished. He said, "You can foresee things, then."

  "Time does not control me in the way it controls you. It is a matter of the way in which one thinks. Perhaps you will learn the technique in due course. Meanwhile, let us place our bet."

  The next morning Barley collected a considerable wad of grimy currency from the liquor clerk: six hundred dollars in return for the dollar he had wagered on number 112. He and Fido had laid careful plans during an all-day walking tour of the city after Barley had bought the number, and Barley now evinced to the clerk a consuming desire to risk his new wealth on a horse. The clerk, by a fortunate coincidence, happened to know of a betting parlor; and because he liked Barley so much, he was agreeable to conducting him there and making the necessary introductions. He asked for himself only a negligible fraction of any winnings. Barley permitted himself to be persuaded.

  By midnight the nest egg had increased tenfold, and Barley-returned to the apartment with his pockets bulging. ''Close to seven thousand,'' he said to Fido. "Enough for Las Vegas, I guess. I'll buy some clothes tomorrow and make my reservations.”

  ***

  Las Vegas was a week altogether divorced from reality, a week without days or nights, a noisy carnival under bright artificial light forming a flashy background to Barley's grim attendance upon roulette tables. "No card games," Fido had said. "The act of betting will affect the outcome, so that any action taken on a basis of knowing what will happen may in fact insure that it will not happen. We will play roulette or craps, or wager upon sporting events." By the end of the week all of Barley's play was made under the cold eyes of dead-faced men who were quite open about their suspicions. When he appeared at a table, there was always a delay while the wheel and the croupier were changed. It did not matter, of course, and Barley boarded the return plane with the comfortable knowledge that the U.S. mails were carrying to his bank, for deposit to his account, a certified check for almost a hundred thousand dollars.

  "We are now ready to begin," Fido said. Barley was stretched comfortably in his seat, drinking the second of the two bottled martinis the stewardess had brought. "We will settle, for the present, in New York. Money will henceforth be no problem: we will open accounts with brokers and speculate in commodities and precious metals and perhaps currencies. Within a comparatively short time we will have adequate capital to do exactly as we wish. As you wish. We will divide your time. Our mornings, for a while, will be spent at the New York Public Library, where I will learn things. The afternoons and evenings will be yours to fill as you see fit, and I will observe my reactions to what you undertake. Do you concur?"

  "Absolutely," Barley said.

  The reading sessions were very strange. Each morning Barley staggered to a reading-room table under the weight of a great stack of books, books that seemed to be on some sort of list that Fido had compiled from a ferociously concentrated attack upon the catalogues and bibliographies. It appeared that his net was spread to capture the whole of human knowledge: science and engineering, history and geography and philosophy, business, war and politics, languages —Fido absorbed them all. Or so Barley supposed. His part was simply to sit staring at the book, turning the pages as fast as he could. He presumed that Fido was taking in all the print; he himself received nothing. And while this was going on, he and Fido carried on long conversations, without which, Barley was quite certain, he would have gone mad with boredom.

  The conversations were mostly questions by Fido and answers by Barley. A good part of the time the questions seemed pointless and trivial to Barley; they skipped disconcertingly from topic to topic, and no line of inquiry seemed to be exhaustively pursued. As time passed, however, he began to catch faint intimations of what Fido was doing: he was, Barley came to think, simultaneously pursuing a whole host of trains of thought, many of which might benefit from information that Barley could furnish. But Barley was unable to answer a host of questions simultaneously; his mind was linear: one question at a time. He answered as well and as fully as he could, but they came in a fusillade: "What temperature do dogs find most agreeable? Do you agree that suffering purifies the character? Are paintings more desirable than statues? What is offensive breath? Describe the sensations of sexual intercourse. List female Christian names that you think to be pleasant. Why are not insects considered to be desirable food? Go back, you turned two pages at once. Do industrial workers more enjoy the study of history or philosophy? What is a prune?" And so on.

  Barley did some questioning, too, but with no very satisfactory results. He was enormously curious about Fido's mission: why it was important that he take back the defector, why the defector had defected, how Fido proposed to take him back, how they traveled to and fro, what would happen if the defector did not chose to cooperate—he had, he thought, as many questions for Fido as Fido had for him. And it appeared that Fido was perfectly willing to give the answers; it was simply that Barley could not understand.

  "Come, Barley," Fido said on one occasion. "Join me on the common ground. We will merge for a moment, and perhaps you will comprehend without words."

  He did. At the moment of fusion it was all instantly clear and anticlimactically simple. He knew what Fido was and what he was a part of, and the function of the entity of which he was a part. He saw why the recreant fragment had taken flight to Earth, and why it was necessary—why it was indeed of the most transcendent importance—that it return. It was perfectly plain and childishly obvious. But when the melding ended, Barley found himself much confused. He was aware that he had the answers he sought, but when he tried to think about what he knew, he was unable to do so, and he was almost forced to believe that he did not know it at all. All that remained was an inchoate uneasiness and apprehension.

  "It is because you think in words," Fido said. "You understand all of this now, but words have no application to the concepts and so are of no use to you; there is no way for you to think about it. In time you will learn, just as I am learning through your senses."

  And he was indeed learning. When the morning's reading ended, and Barley embarked upon leisurely pursuits, Fido remained as avidly curious as during the library hours. He was exploring sensation. "Senses are new to me, Barley," he said. "I must admit they are quite outside anything we had conceived. I would hope to experience every possible sensation. We must continue to pursue it diligently."

  "Not any more tonight," Barley said. "We've sampled every dish on the menu here, and the sensation you are presently experiencing is called nausea. You may find it instructive, but I hate it. I want to go home."

  "By all means. But Barley, the tastes! The textures! The sparkle to the silver, the weave of the napery! Where shall we dine tomorrow? I think I should like to sample Levantine cuisine. I have read of the spiced raw mutton and—ah. That was a nasty twinge, wasn't it? I suppose we must, under the circumstances, go home."

  Home was a penthouse of lordly proportions at the top of a preposterously expensive apartment building. The lobby was guarded by electronic devices and muscular men, and there was a small private elevator that opened only to Barley's key and stopped only at the penthouse; it delivered Barley directly into his living room.

  This was a room of suave luxury and elegance, or would be, after it lost its present indefinable, air of being in transition. Fido's thirst for sensation included the pleasures of the eye, and it was offensive, he said, to live in quarters where the f
urniture and decorations did not form a harmonious whole, did not cohere in esthetic unity. He was therefore engaged in selecting new furniture and paintings, becoming almost testy in urging Barley to discard a chair or rug that had cost an enormous sum only a short time before. "It is all wrong, Barley," he would say. "I am surprised that you cannot see it." And, after the replacement had been made, Barley could see that he had been absolutely right.

  But it disturbed him, in a minor way; it seemed to him that it was presumptuous on Fido's part to make esthetic judgments about things that were, after all, very new to him. Fido disagreed: "We have read what the philosophers say about esthetics, Barley, and we have read the critics and essayists, and we have examined most of the art that is to be seen in this city. We have studied reproductions and pictures of all the important art of your race. It would be surprising if I did not have an esthetic of my own; I have simply built upon the congruencies between the reasoning of the philosophers and what your senses have fed me. I am quite capable of rendering a valid judgment upon a painting; surely, then, so small a matter as the furnishings of a room can be left in my hands. Hands. I believe I have made a small joke, there, Barley. Now that is most interesting."

  A strange sensation rustled through the area of Barley's mind where conversations with Fido took place. After a while he realized what it was: Fido was chuckling. It went on for quite some time. Fido was, it seemed, enormously amused, whether by the excellence of his humor or the novelty of his having perceived it, Barley could not tell.

  "Remarkable," Fido said. "Remarkable. I have a sense of humor."

  "It wasn't much of a joke, you know," Barley said. "As a matter of fact, I'm not sure it was a joke at all."

  "Well, of course I'm not very sophisticated yet," Fido said. "Humor is one of the things we haven't gone into. But there's plenty of time. I expect that soon I will be making very fine jokes. And, now, let us have some music."

  Music was one of the things that they had gone into. An expert had been retained to convert a large room of the penthouse into a chamber for the accurate reproduction of recorded sounds. It boasted a stunning array of mechanical and electronic devices, all governed by a control panel of daunting complexity. Speakers in a variety of shapes and sizes were ranged about the room among a complicated system of baffles and reflectors. In an adjoining room were tens of thousands of records and tapes.

  Fido had first heard music in the liquor store at the time of the purchase of the number. A very old radio, which had not been a good one when it was new, had been blaring rock music of the most debased and mindless category at the top of its tinny capacity. Fido had been entranced. "Barley!" he said. "What is that?"

  "Music," Barley said. "Sort of."

  "Music. I must listen to more music."

  He did just that. The music room was the first project after the acquisition of the penthouse, and for a time they listened for eighteen hours a day. Fido's taste, utterly catholic at first, swiftly became narrow and selective; a minimum of audition had apparently sufficed to exhaust all that was of interest to him in music currently popular, and he quickly turned to the serious music of the Western tradition. And with the best of good taste, too. Barley thought. It had not taken him long to eliminate most of the modems and scarcely longer to get his fill of the romantics. The music most worthy of concentrated attention, Fido appeared to believe, was classical and baroque, and he tended sensibly to opt most often for Bach and Mozart. The ear was most exquisitely ravished where clarity and reason prevailed and a decent restraint was placed on emotion.

  Now' wait a minute, Barley thought. What the hell? I don't know anything about music. Where do I get off making judgments like that?

  But he did know something about music, he discovered. He knew a good deal that he hadn't known before. Up to now he had thought of the coexistence inside his head in an analogy of three rooms, with himself in one, Fido in another, and between them a common room, where they might meet or not, as they wished. He could see now that it was something more than that: there was between them a seepage that went beyond the communication of the common room. His own judgments — made, he would have said, entirely independently of Fido — were informed by a spotty erudition that was entirely new. And he perceived at the back of his consciousness an intimation of the urgency of Fido's mission, a disquieting conviction that Fido's failure would result in some calamity of enormous proportions. Fido had never spoken of this; it simply and suddenly became a part of Barley's knowledge, something somehow leaked from Fido.

  He did not think that the leakage worked both ways. He felt confident that he was effectively excluding Fido from his private thoughts. Certainly there was no evidence that Fido's ideas or attitudes were affected by Barley's; indeed, in a number of areas Fido's inclinations ran precisely contrary to Barley's strongest prejudices. Physical exercise, for example.

  The matter arose when Barley was at the tailor's for a fitting. He had never previously given much thought to clothes or fashions, although occasionally, when he was dressed in his best and caught an unexpected glimpse of himself in a mirror, he had a moment's uneasy awareness that his clothing was, at best, undistinguished. He knew better than to wear a doubleknit leisure suit, perhaps, but at the same time he had never paid enough attention to the cut of clothing to make any real distinction between the various suits a salesman would offer. He tended to dress in suits that were of nondescript color but marked by some odd garishess of design that had resulted from accommodating a jet-set fashion to mass production.

  Fido's interest in clothes changed all that; Barley could now qualify as a clotheshorse. Bespoke suits, artfully tailored from materials whose rich softness and suppleness were a revelation to Barley, were now his daily costume. Fido had come to take a keen —almost fanatical— interest in such matters as the length and diameter of sleeves, the drape from armpit to hem of jacket, and precise amount of tension a button should sustain. And Barley was not ungrateful for the change; sometimes now he had occasion to feel a flicker of admiration for the conspicuously well-tailored man in the chance reflection before he realized that it was himself, Willis Barley, in a suit that had cost as much as ten of the suits he had bought off the rack.

  He was standing in the bay of the tailor's mirror as the tailor tore out basting and inserted pins to effect a slight diminution in the fullness of a trouser leg, and as he stared into the mirror, he could see himself reflected in full-length profile. Fido said peevishly, 'That is quite a belly there, Barley. Look how you stick out. The truth is, you are in bad shape. This is the only body we have, you know. I think what you ought to do is start a program of exercise. "

  "Exercise?" Barley said. "I hate exercise."

  "Then I suppose I shall, too," said Fido. "I experience what you do, you know. But it will be a new experience. It must be tried. Then, too, you will look much better without the belly."

  Which was true. Within a very few weeks a good many excess pounds had disappeared or been redistributed, and a trimmer Barley suddenly found himself taking a certain pride in his body. Each day, two hours were devoted to flab removal and muscle tightening under the stern direction of a slow- witted young man with spectacular biceps. Barley hated every minute of it, but he came almost to admit that it was worth the torture. Fido had no doubts at all. "We feel better, do we not. Barley?" he said. "A spring in the step, a sparkle in the eye. It is a pleasure to be alive. You are ten years younger than when I first came aboard."

  And that was true, as well. Barley felt better than he had felt for a long time. But it was only partly in consequence of the improved muscle tone. Fido's insatiable curiosity and bottomless appetite for sensory experience had opened whole worlds to Barley, and it was clear to him that his new sense of well-being stemmed more from an altered view of life than from physical improvement. Now each day had its goal: these foods and vintages to be tasted, those pictures and statues to be viewed, that music to be heard; horses to be ridden, cars to be driven, and, of la
te, tennis matches to be played.

  "And women," Fido said. "I think it is time to do something about women. I have been waiting for you to get on with it. Barley — I feel what you feel, as I point out from time to time — but you have not made a move. Why not?"

  The answer was complex and none of Fido's business. He had in truth begun to feel seriously deprived, especially since receiving notification of the final decree in his divorce proceedings, but he remained highly diffident about undertaking the pursuit of women. He did not have to remind himself that it had been twenty-five years since he had been up to that sort of thing and that he had not been conspicuously successful even then. During the years of his marriage it had never crossed his mind to detour from the straight and narrow path, despite the fact that the usual opportunities had come his way from time to time. He assumed that he had been able to accomplish this feat of fidelity because over the years he had achieved a degree of success in subliminating his concupiscence. He had had to; throughout their marriage his wife had remained less than enthusiastic about the bed, and when at last her aging glands modified the chemistry of her body so that she became honestly lustful, the beneficiary was not himself but her swarthy partner in adultery.

  Those, however, were bygone matters; it was a new day, and the liberation of the spirit that his changed life had brought him had effected a considerable freshening of his libido. But an old man pursuing young women had always seemed to Barley to be a comical and degraded spectacle, and he wanted no part of it. He said as much to Fido.

  "But, of course, Barley," Fido said. "Who is to say that it must be a young woman? Make your selection as the spirit — if that is the word — moves you. It occurs to me that at this juncture you might resort to the services of a professional, which would be simple, without complications, and, in the category you are well able to afford, perfectly hygienic."

  In the event, Barley did not choose that course because, once he had made his decision, he was agreeably surprised to discover that what he sought lay all about him. He discovered that the environs of the city were from end to end a silken whisper of soft desire, a susurrus of lovely women who, at the peak of ripe desirability, had come to doubt themselves and to yearn for reassurance. The approach of the fortieth birthday shook them with terror; its arrival cast them into black hells of despondency. In their pleasant houses they stared with unbelieving eyes at themselves and their world. They would look at the gangling lout gorging at the refrigerator, at the precociously nubile sullen girl endlessly gabbling into the telephone, and think; Can it really be that I am the mother of these? Is it really me living like this, with nothing more in life than these — creeps — and this house and dull John in his Brooks Brothers suit? Suddenly I am forty and I am not famous and I do not associate with glamorous people and I have never had an adventure and I am old. I want —