The Tehama and others Read online

  “There is nothing supernatural about me,” Scranton said, “although these things might make me seem so to you. I am a member of a race immeasurably older than yours, evolved along considerably different lines, and my abilities are quite natural. As you surmise, I am not a human being, but I am nonetheless a fellow-creature, warm-blooded and approximately mammalian.”

  Stanley found that he had passed beyond fear or incredulity; in a light-headed and dissociated way he was possessed by a ravenous curiosity. “From Outer Space?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes, from Outer Space. Very far out. And Outer Time, too, one might say. These things tend to become somewhat intermixed when certain modes of transport are employed.”

  “Why did you — what are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? What indeed.” Scranton was silent for a moment. Then he said, “This is what I’ve been doing here, Stanley: I have spent the past ten years taking control of Consolidated Pipe and Tube, for the sole and only purpose of providing the facilities and camouflage for building the apparatus housed in that dome out there. Before that, I spent about a century in manipulating the affairs of your race so that the technology necessary to build it would be developed. That involved a couple of major wars and a host of minor ones, and a space race, and a great many dreary years of slipping ideas into the minds of scientists and engineers and politicians. And before that, before it became clear that the construction of the apparatus had become necessary, I simply lived among the savages. I cannot say that I shall miss you.”

  “You mean you’re going to leave?”

  “I am going to leave. Quite soon.”

  “Well, then, in God’s name, tell me,” Stanley said. “Why me? Why were you hounding me? What could I do to you?”

  There might have been something like compassion in Scranton’s voice. “I wasn’t hounding you, Stanley,” he said. “I was watching you, yes. I had to do that. But the terror you suffered, your sense of calamity and doom — I was not causing those. At least not directly. You see something quite terrible is about to happen to the human race. The ultimate catastrophe, in fact. To put it bluntly, mankind has reached the end of its road.”

  Stanley believed him. The concept was too big to comprehend immediately, too awful for his mind’s quick acceptance; but he knew Scranton was telling the truth. The beginnings of a host of questions and protests boiled up in his mind and failed of utterance. Scranton went on:

  “The catastrophe is inevitable, and it is imminent, and it has cast its shadow before it. You have felt the chill of that shadow, Stanley. Your race has latent within it the ability to use its mind as my race does, and it has as well a buried talent that we do not have: the capacity to send perception along a chord of Time’s circle — to see the future. The very enormity of the calamity that lies just ahead has forced a reaching across that chord; deep within the subconscious mind of every human being on Earth is the sure knowledge of imminent doom. In a few people it is very near to the surface. You are one of them, Stanley, and the only one unfortunate enough to be here in Wallboro, at the place where the end begins. That’s why I watched you; there was always the possibility that something specific would break through to you, and you would try to frustrate me. At that point I had no intention of being annoyed by petty obstacles. I watched you to protect my plan.”

  “Your plan?” said Stanley.

  “Oh, come now, Stanley, don’t pretend you’re surprised. You’ve figured out what the apparatus in the dome is for, haven’t you?” Stanley realized that he had. He went rigid with shock and horror, staring at Scranton with incredulous eyes. The tableau held for a moment, and then Stanley exploded into furious motion, bending, grasping his knife, leaping for Scranton’s throat. In midleap he was seized by an invisible, irresistible force and slammed to the floor. The knife jerked itself from his hand, hovered in the air for a moment, and then moved in a graceful arc to the desk, where it settled gently. The invisible force plucked Stanley off the floor and deposited him without gentleness in his chair.

  Scranton said, “That was pointless.”

  Stanley made a frantic effort to get at Scranton; he could not move a muscle. He said in a strangled voice, “You can’t do it!” Scranton did not reply. Stanley’s voice went thin, high, and almost out of control. “But why, why? To — to kill all the people —”

  “I’m afraid it’s a little more than that,” Scranton said. “The truth is that that gadget out there is not only going to kill humanity, it is going to eliminate life on Earth entirely, right down to the last bacterium and virus. Earth will be entirely dead, Stanley.”

  “Why?”

  “I am hunted and pursued, Stanley, and I dare not leave clues behind me. My presence here has left ineradicable marks, but a lifeless planet will never even be investigated. It’s simple self-protection. One does what he must when he is in jeopardy. Remember Dorothy Barr.”

  Stanley had a terrifying thought. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  “Many times, Stanley, many times.” His face went bleak for a moment. “And I daresay I shall do it many times more.”

  “No!” Stanley shouted. “No, sir! It won’t happen! You’ll be stopped! Somebody will stop you!” “I think not, Stanley. The fact is that it’s already been done. Listen.”

  Somewhere near at hand an enormous tension was at that moment released, and a mighty surge of energy was generated and almost instantly quenched. There was no sound, there was not even a vibration; but Stanley could sense the ghostly edge of it, and he knew then, with a cold and desolate certainty, that the unthinkable had taken place. Inside him something stopped. His mind made a few frantic lunges, recognized the futility of it, and opted for numbness. He sat and stared with dull eyes through the tall windows behind Scranton. Night had fallen as they talked, and the unchanging sky was full of stars.

  “The end,” Scranton said. “The end, without even a whimper. And only you are left. Here in this room we are in the eye of the storm, as it were, and for a moment you have been spared. It leaves you very much alone, Stanley, more alone than ever a man was before. But I’ll be leaving in a moment, and when I do, the room will no longer be protected. You won’t suffer loneliness long.” He opened a drawer of the desk and removed a device of black metal, about the size of the cigar humidor. “My transportation,” he said. “Is there anything more you’d like to say before I go?”

  The dull eyes shifted to look at him. “Yes,” Stanley’s leaden voice said. “Two questions. Will you tell me what you did that you should be hounded for so long and pursued so far? And who are the pursuers?”

  Scranton snapped erect. “Did?” he said indignantly. “What it was that I did?” His face twisted. “I did nothing. Nothing. You haven’t understood at all. You think I’m a criminal on the run. Well, you’re wrong, quite wrong.” His air of cool detachment had left him; his voice was aggrieved and resentful now, with an undercurrent of feckless anger. “I’m being hideously persecuted. I’m much more of a victim than you and your grubby kind. I’ve been harassed for no reason for longer than you can imagine. And they never relent, never ease the pressure.”

  “You say ‘they,’” Stanley said. “Who are ‘they?” It was important to talk. Talking kept reality at bay.

  “Enemies,” Scranton said. “Horrible enemies. They never expose themselves, but they’re there, they’re out there somewhere. There’s no way to fight them. That’s why I have to keep running and hiding.” A crafty expression came over his face. “I’m good at that. I know how to cover my tracks. You’ve seen that.” He suddenly became fearful. “But they always get close again. It’s so hard to keep ahead of them. I’m tired.”

  “But who?” Stanley said. “Tell me who.”

  “I don’t know, you fool, I don’t know. They’re just there, and they hate me, they hate me. They may be watching me now. That’s what they do, you know. They watch me.” He cast an apprehensive glance over his shoulder at the window. “Somewhere the
y’re watching. Some day they’ll pounce. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.”

  The mad eyes met Stanley’s in a mute appeal for sympathy and understanding. Outside in the night a breeze had risen and made familiar noises against the window-pane.

  Loob

  (The Magazine of Fantasy and S.F., April 1979)

  It may be that none of this happened.

  That is badly put. Let me say it another way: none of this will have happened at the instant — which I believe must come eventually — the instant that Loob permits my great-grandfather to pass unscathed through the drawing room door.

  I believe that one day Loob will permit it. I think he must. Because if he does not, my existence is an impossibility. And I do exist. Cogito, ergo sum. Besides which, I have an actual physical presence: yesterday I cut myself when I shaved (there is a decided tremor in my hands), I have a blister on my right foot, these seedy clothes cover a breathing body.

  Officially, though, and perhaps in law, I do not exist. Neither the county nor the state has any record of my birth (nor my father’s; my grandmother’s birth, however, is duly recorded). Lawrenceville and Princeton have no record of my attendance and graduation. Even the United States Army, that indefatigable maker and keeper of records has no paper that acknowledges my three years of servitude. And it is a melancholy fact that no one in the world seems to know or remember me; not friends from prep school days, not college classmates or fellow officers, not a soul in the old home town. My precise and detailed recollection of my twenty-five years of life is always and everywhere belied by records both public and private, and by every reality of the world around me.

  Yet I am real, I am a living, breathing, thinking human being, as solid and sentient as any of the degenerates who surround me here. As I skulk about this decrepit travesty of my native town, I reflect endlessly upon my impossible existence, upon the resemblances and differences between this world and my own, upon an explanation for the situation in which I find myself. And I have found the explanation, and in finding it I find some hope. I can only wait, and watch Loob.

  It is true that certain parts of my explanation are, perhaps, in a way, to a certain degree (if you like) conjectural; nonetheless, it hangs together, it hangs together. Up to a certain August day in 1905 this world and my own were identical; my explanation rests, therefore, on simple, unarguable fact. On that day there was a divergence, a forking, and Loob was the cause. It took me some time to figure that out.

  To identify Loob as the villain, that is. I was much quicker at the rest of it, at accounting for the existence of this town. It is located where the town of my birth is located, it bears the same name, it has the same history up to a point. It is composed of the same streets and buildings that make up the older part of my own town, horribly run-down here, all in a state of slovenly desuetude, with buildings vacant and boarded up, trash in the deserted streets, insolent weeds growing in and around the ruins of structures that have burned or fallen down. It is a depressed and depressing place, forming a most bleak and demoralizing contrast with the self-confident bustle and gloss of the town I knew.

  My own situation is also considerably different. There I am the heir apparent, the young master, indulged in expensive toys — a Ferrari, a string of polo ponies — by a doting grandmother. Here I work as a swamper in a saloon; the Top Hat Bar and Grill, to be exact. It is the only work available to a nameless unperson. (They call me Tom Perkins. I don’t know where they got that. Back when I still talked, I used to ask them to use my real name, but the request always generated so much laughter that I gave it up.) At that, I am one of the very few people here who work; most of the town is on welfare, as I might be myself if I could establish the fact that I exist. Ironically, they have volunteered to put me on the welfare rolls under the name of Tom Perkins, an offer which I declined. That also caused a good deal of laughter.

  Day after day, as I cleaned the spittoons (three-pound coffee cans, actually) and mopped the foul floor, my mind was occupied by a sustained effort to discover, through the application of the most rigorous logic, a theory to account for my presence in a world where my presence is impossible. (This was after my parole from the state hospital, after I had achieved a measure of resignation to my plight.) The initial stages of my analysis were simple enough: I postulated that any occurrence, anywhere, anytime, is a cause that has a consequent effect. A major occurrence has a major effect and changes history. Now, from the beginning, history has been an infinity of forks in a road, with the road not taken disappearing forever after it is passed, so that a backward look shows only a single thoroughfare stretching to the rear. But suppose that somehow, from our present position on this thoroughfare, a barricade could be hurled backward, back to one of those forks in the road, compelling events to travel on the alternative route. As time went by, and fork after fork came and went, a retrospective survey of the route taken would not show that the main road was missed long ago. It would not show that we now travel on a detour, a sad, sick, degenerate, abominable detour. But the main road is still there, is still there. I think logic dictates that we must believe it is still there.

  The exercise of pure reason had brought me to that point, but there my search for the truth began to appear to be almost hopeless. Reduced to essentials, it had become a search for the villain. Someone had erected the barricade that shunted history into the detour and exiled me from the main road to this wretched byway, and whoever he was, he had to be found and compelled to undo his villainy. But the world is a big place, containing a very considerable number of people, and I had not the least vague clue to his identity. A mad scientist? A military secret project? A lama spinning a prayer wheel in Tibet?

  My problem was further complicated by the fact that I am not permitted to leave town. The people at the state hospital have decreed that I must be brought in once a month to be questioned and tested, presumably for reassurance that I can safely continue to be farmed out to the Top Hat Bar and Grill. I gather that before my incarceration I sometimes did violent things. (When I compare my mashed-in face with the way I used to look, I can believe it.) Okie Perkins, Prop. of the Top Hat Bar and Grill, drives me to these monthly vettings, where I steadfastly maintain silence despite the often ingenious subterfuges the headshrinkers use to get me to talk. I have promised myself that I shall speak no word until I am back where I belong. Obviously this vow was a further impediment to my investigation.

  But I had some good luck, which served me as well as cold reason and sedulous research could have done. I found Loob. At some point in my despairing prowlings through the town, I became aware of him, and I came gradually to realize that I had found the culprit. It was no blazing revelation, or anything of that sort; but as soon as I began to suspect him I undertook to weigh his qualifications as a suspect against the indisputable facts, and, little by little, it became perfectly plain that it was indeed Loob who had done this unspeakable thing. I matched the history of the town — one history until 1905, and then two, both of which I had pondered obsessively — with what I knew about Loob, and at last the whole grim story was laid out for me.

  I said that finding him was good luck, but it was bad luck as well, because my plan to compel an undoing of the evil has come to nothing; quite clearly there is no way to compel Loob to do anything at all. There is not even any way to talk to him — which I would be eager to do if he could understand. But he cannot talk, and so certain portions of the story must remain forever conjecture. But they fit the facts, the whole thing coheres.

  So now I watch him and wait for the day when he will undo what he did. Because there is nothing to do but watch and wait. And (I cannot help it) hope. I stalk him through the town, willing him to go to the house, to sit in the window. That is where he must be to change things back. When he is in the house, I usually lurk somewhere outside, not because I can affect what may happen, but simply out of an unexplainable feeling that I should be there. And then, too, looking at the house can sometimes evoke my r
eal life so strongly that for a moment I forget where I am.

  The house, my grandmother’s house in the real world. A mansion with many chimneys, enduringly built of the pale-gray local sandstone, still displaying a basic elegance of line and proportion. Its walls remain as stout as the day they were built, and the slates of the roof still turn the rain; but there is no glass in any window, nor a door in any doorway, and the winds sweep through, blowing dust and trash in squalid patterns across the floor. There are no rooms on the first story; the interior walls were torn out years ago and replaced by a number of steel poles to bear the weight of the upper floors. In the cavernous space thus created, a foredoomed machine shop had existed precariously for a few years before it sank into bankruptcy and abandoned its worn-out lathes and drills to the scavengers and vandals. This is where Loob likes to be.

  He likes to sit on a box in one of the oriel windows. From there he looks down to the river, across the junk piles and weeds that were once a smooth lawn sloping to the edge of the woods, across the rusty railroad tracks and decaying sheds that stand where great trees grew in the days when the house was in history’s mainstream. He sits there for a large part of almost every day, watching an inconstant landscape: seeing sometimes a squirm of rats among frozen weeds, sometimes a small giggling girl frolicking with a patient dog on a summer lawn, sometimes other things. Loob feels no curiosity about these alterations of the view. Most things in life are incomprehensible to him, and all phenomena are equally unexpected and equally unsurprising. But the little girl engages somewhat more of his attention than do the rats; the pretty lady at the piano is marginally more interesting than a ruined milling machine. Loob is happier (if that is the word for the viscid stirring within him) when he is watching the past.