Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 11th Part 7

Neat trick, Brant thought, taking it. He watched, fascin-ated.

"Then I played with other kids," Farouche said. "We played simple, familiar, every-day games, such as cowboy and Indian ... Do you mind?" He opened the desk drawer and took out a length of stout twine and doubled it and tied Brant's hands and feet, deftly, making him fast to the swivel chair.

Then he smiled and sat down. "All right, now just go on relaxing while I continue. One point: I want you to express yourself, always. If you have anything to say, say it. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly," Brant said. He was feeling a little bounce of exhilaration in the pit of his stomach. It was like being tickled. This guy could certainly generate excitement. Also, it was harmless; all he had to do was reach out and flip the intercom switch and Dr. Eyck and Miss Potter would be here inside of two minutes. Besides, this was good therapy. Brant believed in going along with the patient all the way, as long as things didn't get rough.

"Ropes too tight? How do you feel?"

"I feel fine," Brant grinned.

"Excellent! Care for a cigarette?"

Brant nodded. Farouche lifted a cigarette out of the doc-tor's breast pocket and put it between his lips and lit it for him. "I'm delighted to be here," he said. "I'm glad to have been referred to the famous and capable hands of yourself and your young partner, and of Miss Potter, that under-standing nurse with the starched bosom and the prim smile. You're one of the few men around with imagination. You're accessible, you can change; so you can be cured. And Eyck tries to follow in your footsteps. That's why I chose this place."

"Ah," said Brant. "You chose this place."

Farouche smiled. He removed the cigarette so the doctor could exhale.

"Yes; I like a small private inst.i.tution like this, although the large joint of which I was so recently a part was pretty cool too ... But I was running through my past for you. For instance, Grandma dreamed she died of heart failure. This scared her so badly she woke up and died of heart failure. Silly,wasn't it? And that's the way they go. I have an early memory of Grandma bending over me to whis-per, 'Go to sleep and don't worry, Daddy Warbucks will be here in the morning with the helicopter.' That's all I remem-ber about Grandma, for which I'm grateful ... Did you realize that I'm not at all sophisticated? I should say pseudo-sophisticated; that's the fas.h.i.+on of the day; every-body who is anybody is pseudo-sophisticated, with tailfins. I'm a bit of a primitive myself. And I can tell you a story to prove it. Would you like to listen?"

"No," Brant said.

"Good. I like a bit of spirit in a prisoner. What would you like to hear instead?"

"Tell me about your s.e.x upbringing."

"Ah! The first honest psychiatrist I've ever seen," Far-ouche marveled.

"Well, as usual, I had a s.e.x upbringing that could choke a crocodile into not laying eggs. However, I made up for all that later; and since you're being so honest, I'll tell you some hot love stories out of my past. I see that you're fond of s.e.x, comics, and adventure stories, in that order. So okay. My past is full of all three.

"Now this episode happened south of Pago-Pago, in a Spanish galleon, of which I was the captain. Also the abso-lute b.l.o.o.d.y dictator-what fun, to be a b.l.o.o.d.y dictatorl I loved it. The s.h.i.+p was naturally not a real Spaniard; she was a Hollywood mock-up swiped off the MGM back lot one dark night, complete with skull flag and keelhauling equip-ment and her name in blazing rubies, Corsair's Revenge ... Now relax; the hot scenes come later,"

he said, smiling.

"I'm not that hung up," Brant said huffily.

"Oh, come on. I'm a telepath-haven't you noticed yet? Anyway, I'll tell you about the crew. The crew! Some boys. I rented them along with the s.h.i.+p, see. I rented the whole works from MGM, right after that studio brought out its colossal sea epic, SWORDS ACROSS JAMAICA. As my first mate I rented the star of the picture, a typical Hollywood waxwork named Rock Bottom. I suppose you think the whole idea was silly."

"Not at all. Except I'm wise you use the term 'rent' ad-visedly."

"Ahhh!" Yog Farouche smiled, leaned back in his chair and stared at Brant.

"You're coming along fine. You'll be a well man in no time. Already you sound half alive ... Well, do you get the picture? Here we are, a blood-thirsty, woman- hungry crew, clipping across the Spanish Main, looking for Yankee s.h.i.+ps to plunder. The boys all wear faded blue dungarees, calf-length, with daggers at the waist or between the teeth, and no s.h.i.+rts except on brisk evenings; also techni-color make-up at all times; they are a typical strength and health crowd from Vine Street. I myself wear an Admiral's costume, with sword and much gold frogging, the cat-o'-nine-tails twitching in my hand ...

Is this coming along to your taste?""Pretty much," Brant said, interested. "Where do the dames come in?"

"Soon, soon. Anyway, mornings, we practiced the Extras Ma.s.sing Scene, or Operation Swarm. The men climbed the rigging, jumping from high places to mattresses strategically placed below. They engaged in hurly-burly brawls on the bridge and down the hatches. The more daring ones swung from ropes, leaped therefrom to the brawny backs of their mates, and engaged them in noisy combat, drawing blood pretty often. In the afternoon they drank rum and swam bare and chased the cabin boy round the mizzenmast and so forth. Myself, I am up in the crow's nest yelling salty obscen-ities and enjoying the whole scene. Get the picture?"

"Very clearly," said Brant, spellbound.

"Okay. So the first Yankee s.h.i.+p to cross our path was the Queen Mary.

Wasn't that a b.i.t.c.h? Naturally we couldn't back out after all that rehearsal, so we figured what the h.e.l.l, go for baroque. At first the s.h.i.+p was a dim bug on the horizon, but she expanded, gradually, inexorably, like a bad dream.

We came about and hove to, taking up picturesque positions about the deck. Mr. Bottom was especially magnificent, with his drawn cutla.s.s and bare chest; he reminded me of my Uncle Sigh, after the latter lost his body hair in a boiler explosion ... I personally am dividing my operations be-tween' bridge and chartroom, rubbing my hands, chuckling about the rapine and plunder to come, smacking my lips, etc., etc. ... Then, I ordered the first broadside fired."

"That's not fair! You're supposed to board them in per-son," Brant protested.

"What's not fair, square? It was a blank, naturally. I told you this was a Metro s.h.i.+p. It was the other captain who behaved like a complete swine.

Without waiting for the smoke to clear, he fired, and this was no dummy, and we sank on the spot. Oh, it didn't take much. After all, the galleon was quite fragile. Like so many of our hopes and fears and de-sires..."

His amber eyes clouded. He relapsed into silence. Brant said, "But everything turned out all right, didn't it? Because you're here, aren't you?

Alive and happy and all?"

"Alive?" Farouche said with a bitter little laugh. "Happy? ... I never knew what became of my crew. I couldn't swim in my admiral suit. Straight down I went, like a stone, to the bottom of the sea, and then I lost consciousness. When I awoke the most beautiful woman was giving me artificial respiration. As I reached for her she turned to the side and disappeared; brother, that's when I got up and made a dash for it. But there was no place to go! I kept running into the edge of the paper.

"Let me explain. It was like being an exchange student with Flatland. In this sea-bottom country, I found myself trapped in a two-dimensional nightmare. At first it looked like a very broad stage setting, with cardboard props and scenery and a mind-shattering afterglow coming from no-where, from the land of Ag, from a water-color sun in some other dimension. Thenthe truth hit me. I had fallen into a night scene in a comic strip! Grandma! I thought instantly; she's laid a curse on me.

"It was ghastly. Yellow light gleamed through four-sec-tioned windows, and suddenly a huge yellow moon appeared in the upper righthand corner of the square. I moved down a street of houses which were all facades; when I went be-hind one, I saw the back of the house, with its two-dimen-sional porch upon which stood some flat milkbottles, and a drunken two-dimensional husband trying to sneak in the back door before the clock struck. I knew there'd be trouble so I moved off in a hurry. Farther along were fire-plugs, and dogs to sniff them-you've seen a city landscape in the comics? Well, Grandma, or whoever was mocking this scene up for me, hadn't left out anything. But not a single thing.

"Behind the houses was a pitch-black alley. I felt lost, abandoned. I saw a row of garbage cans, flat, gleaming, aluminum, and a flat high wooden fence with the word meow flas.h.i.+ng on and off above it. I saw a pair of s.h.i.+ny yellow eyes and a flying (though static) shoe and a big MEOW and a stream of *!!?**??!!, and at this point I began to lose my sanity. Cricket noises rose about me, perfect let-tered. A fake wind blew some leaves along the gutter. This was the ultimate in dream suburbiana! The people were asleep; I could tell because out of the four-paned windows came a lot of white balloons, and in each balloon was a saw cutting a log in half, and above the log was the word ZZZZZZZZZ...

"I've never been so scared in my life. A rolling pin flew toward me and went POW and flew away, and I began to run, my shoes pounding on that 2D pitch-black alley be-tween the jagged fences under that slice of yellow moon. It was so utterly-"

"Horrifying," Dr. Brand breathed, wriggling in his bonds.

"Completely. I lived in that country for six months. Six long months, evenings and Sundays only! Can you imagine what that would do to a man's sense of balance? What a freak I felt. How round, how queer, how rejected.

There was a disease they got, it never appears in the papers, but some-times it causes the corpses to twitch and jerk; these symptoms set in at the moment of death... You remember Miss Raven, don't you? Such a terrible thing. But I promised not to tell. Anyway, I don't want to chill you with tales of two-dimensional corpses. It was worse than that. Far worse. I fell in love."

"Ahhh," said Brant, his eyes widening.

"Well may you ahhh," Farouche said sadly. "She was gorgeous. She was a redhead. She was a sensation. Her dialogue-you should have seen her balloons! Witty! Sparkling! s.e.x! She made dumb broads like Snow White look like lumps of coal-tar. Her face was so round, so pink, without a lot of hideous detail; just eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth, and a couple of red spots for the cheeks. No shaded con-tours, no lights and shadows-this girl was pure. Like you don't often find them any more. And when she spoke!

Clear black words, in a white balloon, floating over her lovely head: BANG!, she would say, and HOT DINGIES!, and HEY THERE, LOVER BOY, LETS GRAB A COUPLA HAMBURGERS-Oh, my G.o.d! I'll never forget her, to my dyingday!"

He burst into tears. Brant watched, disturbed and sad-dened. Gently he said, "But you left that country, anyway, and came back here, didn't you?"

Farouche nodded, tears streaming down his cheeks. He took out a blue polka-dotted handkerchief and blew his nose. He caught his breath. "I got a letter from a guy who signed himself Zarkov. It said, 'You cubist, you are a walking crime against nature. I have constructed a duplicate of you using chicken skin and wire. Get out of this strip immediately or I will turn it over to the brutal and sinister Kah-Mee for torture.' ... Do you think I'm a coward, Brant? Tell me honestly."

The physchiatrist smiled grimly. "I've heard of the Kah-Mee," he said shortly. "You're no coward. It would have been a fate worse than death."

"Yeah. That's what I figured you'd say. So anyway, I split until the heat blew over. You're a sympathetic sort of chap, Brant. Would you like to see a picture of my girl?"

"I'd love to," Brant said eagerly.

Yog Farouche pulled a wallet out of his hip pocket, ex-tracted a piece of five-colored paper from it, unfolded the paper and spread it out on Brant's knee. The psychiatrist sucked in his breath. "Wow," he said. "What a build.

Gor-geous!" Across the bottom of the page was written, in a deli-cate feminine hand: "To Yoggsy, for memories and futures, with all of my love, Brenda Starr."

"She's a honey," Brant said, licking his dry lips. "You sure were one lucky guy."

Farouche grunted. "That's what you think. What relations.h.i.+p can anybody have with a two-dimensional woman? Just imagine it! Go ahead! ...

Frustrating, isn't it?"

"Ahhh," Brant said, a new light coming into his eyes.

"Yeah." Farouche put the picture back in his wallet. He rubbed his head with his knuckles and he yawned. "Well, it's over and done with, a good many years now. I'm not go-ing to weep my weeps in public. Once again I escaped out the northeast corner of the world. Hunted, persecuted, the man without a country, always by submarine, Miami to Bos-ton, New Orleans to San Diego, forever the neon jungle and the low-register clarinet and overhead the moon like a monocle, like the big eye of the angel ... My friend, we are two puppet masters making our dolls shake hands, believing this to be the only medium of communication. But let me put you wise to the secret of the universe. Here it comes: The grail blends into a trolley line that goes over your head."

"I don't understand," Brant said.

Farouche grinned. "Honester and honester. You're hardly a h.o.m.o sap anymore. Can you see suns going around inside of stars going around inside of suns? Then you're on the right path. Listen, pal. Let's face it. I am seventy-three trillion years old. I've seen empires rise and fall: Rome and Athens, Ur and Egypt, Atlantis and Mu, Fanthor and Grograndina, back before the beginning of time, and you don't seem surprised at all ... What's wrong? Did you suddenly remember something?"

"Yes," Brant whispered, straining forward in his bonds, his eyes alive and eager. "Listen, you know where I come from? Yeow! Where the electrons are slightly smaller, hence the ehronons are shorter-think what this does to a Mickey Mouse watch! So we have electrons hopping from now to the other side of now, forming different elements; this is the Flipped Coin theory, beautiful as light running through water in s.p.a.ce! Do you know that I watched-"

"You're cured," Farouche said. He threw his leg over the chair-arm and began to buff his fingernails, looking bored. "The rest is old hat to me, pal."

"I watched t.i.tanosaurus hatch and wither, right here on this little planet!

This planet-hah! Once I wouldn't have stopped here for fuel. This is the backwoods, the edge of town-up there is where all the interesting people live. You can see it on starry nights, the stamping-ground of the intergalactic smart set ... If you knew what games they play, and against what fabulous settings! Listen, Yoggsy. Help me. I've got to go back home.

I've got to go back home! I've got to go back home!"

His voice rose to a shriek. Farouche got up, waving him silent. "Shhh! Do you want that Potter b.i.t.c.h in here, that starched custodian of wilted souls?

Wait!" He went over to the window and threw one foot across the sill and disappeared into the garden. In a few moments he was back, with a flat green leaf in his hand and the radiant smile on his face.

"Look here, friend." He held the leaf in front of Brant's eyes. In the cupped center of it stood a round firm s.h.i.+m-mering dew-drop. He said, "Nasturtium, with a jewel. Look. Don't think; simply look."

Brant looked. The drop was only a dew-drop. It was a moist solid tiny crystal ball. Inside was the room, turned upside-down, and his own curved attenuated face, and the open window, the sun streaming in, Yog Farouche holding a nasturtium leaf, with a crystal ball in the center, and inside the ball was a room, with an open window, and the sun streaming in, and a world in a world in a world in a whirled- Brant flipped the switch and said, "Send Eyck" in, Miss Potter, I see what you mean, I certainly do exist. And not because I think, either. Just the opposite. Zowie! Untie me fast!"

Farouche jerked a knot and the rope fell loose. "Here there and everywhere," he said. "It's all yours, beyond the groping fingers of time.

Will you remember that?"

"Certainly. Why not? Think of all the hours I wasted! Powie! What do I do now?""You go back to my cubicle. If anybody asks, your name is Yog Farouche. If they keep asking, tell them about the land of Yeow. By the way, you are completely rehabilitated in three days, after which you take over Superman's job both daily and Sunday and from there on you're on your own. Are you pleased?"

"Delighted," Brant said, beaming.

"All right; tomorrow, same time, same wave-length. But first, push the intercom b.u.t.ton and ask Dr. Eyck to come in here."

Brant flipped the switch and said, "Send Eyck in, Miss Potter," and closed the switch again.

Farouche said, "How do you feel now?"

"I feel very happy. I feel absolutely secure and unspeak-ably serene."

"Good; you'll feel even better tomorrow. I'll see you then."

He closed the door, rubbed his hands briskly, and sat down in Brant's chair behind the big desk. He picked up a blank card from the pile on the desk, and looked at it. Then he opened the drawer and found a bottle of ink, poured some ink on the card, smeared it around with his fingers, blotted it off, and placed the card second in the pile. At that mo-ment, Dr. Eyck came in.

Eyck looked alarmed. "Where's Dr. Brant?"

"Out," said Farouche. "Don't worry; he's put me on mini-mum security." He smiled the radiant smile.

"Oh." The young psychiatrist sat down in the easy-chair. He was a husky blond in whites, with a long face and a broken nose, and he was wearing horn gla.s.ses. "Minimum security, hey? You sound like an old hand around here ... h.e.l.lo, a nasturtium leaf. Where'd this come from?"

"Outside in the garden," Farouche said.

Eyck smiled gently. "Not in this garden. We've only got roses."

"This year, yes; but you will have nasturtiums, summer after next."

"Well, now, that may be true," Eyck said, letting his ex-pression go bland.

"So Dr. Brant put you on minimum se-curity, did he? Where did you say he went?"

"I didn't say, but he's out getting in touch with some people he used to know. He wants you to check me on Rorschach while he's gone. Said to tell you he slipped a couple of different blots into the pack, but you just record my state-ments as usual. Whatever that means," he smiled.Eyck smiled back and settled in the chair, on familiar grounds now. "First, you're to look at the ink-blots I show you, and then describe what they seem like to you. I'll just jot down what you say. Say anything that comes into your mind," he said, handing over the top card.

Farouche looked at it. He squinted. He turned it upside down. "Reminds me of blue light pa.s.sing through a chunk of ice ... You can feel the wind in it.

It's a man who puts his fingers to his temples and concentrates on smas.h.i.+ng eggs. Ever try that? ... Yes, he's obviously from Betelgeuse, where I was born; crepuscular, in moss gray and moss green, under the blurred signs; and now he's a young psychiatrist whose heart is doing a different thing than his hands. Very sad. Very sad. Very sad."

"Ah," said Dr. Eyck, looking at Farouche for the first time. "Go ahead. What else? Does it remind you of anything in your past?"

"Yeah; it reminds me of the time I put some dough on three race horses; one named Fat Chance, one named Zeitgeist, one named Go for Baroque ...

Funny how some guys like long odds more than life itself ... I took one look at your paint-smeared face and I knew you were one of them ... Anyway, I was saying-Goethe, who dropped out of the race some time ago, once asked me this question: Did you ever watch while a bird hypnotizes a snake into eating it?"

Dr. Eyck wrote busily, nodding. "Go on, go on," he said.

"I remember I dumped five grand on Fat Chance and another five on Zeitgeist, simply because I hated myself that day. But the very next day I loved myself and I won a quarter of a million on Go for Baroque. I want you to re-member that. The horse's name will remind you. Baroque-that means 'irregular in form'-it's more fun that way, see. Will you remember?"

"Certainly," Dr. Eyck smiled, writing.

"Eyck, old boy, no wonder you never change anybody. You don't even know anybody is there."

"...How's that?"

"You're alive like a machine," Farouche said. "You don't experience anything. You have a shortage of viewpoints. So naturally you don't help anybody; you just wear a white coat and follow the rulebook."

"We effect a good many cures-" Eyck began stiffly.

"Oh, snap it off. A witch doctor will cure the same per-centage. Check the figures some time. Look at me." He held Eyck's eyes with his amber ones for a few seconds. "You've been thinking along the same lines, haven't you?"