“Then you lose. Sometimes you must even do evil — oh, so that good may come of it, but it’s all tooth and claw, devil take the hindmost.”
So I began to know, Drozma, that Jacob Feuermann was dead.
I knocked and entered. Hardly prepared at all, driven to intervene as some human beings are, when they sense danger to those they love. I recaptured Mr. Miles in time to close the door peacefully and light a cigarette. It was only Mr. Miles whom Angelo saw from his lazy perch on the window seat. I did not care what was seen by that other in the room.
He was in the armchair with his feet on the hassock which Feuermann had worn threadbare. He was even smoking the horse-head meerschaum. That added illogically to my wrath: I may have made one of those human identifications with the inanimate which we are warned to avoid. “Hope I’m not intruding,” I said as I intruded. “Had a hankering for the consolations of philosophy.” I couldn’t have cared less about philosophy. “Throw me out if the spirit moves.” I straddled a chair near the window. He would have had to throw chair and all, and he couldn’t have done it. It was at least some comfort to have no physical fear. “That’s a beautiful meerschaum, by the way. You must be a fancier of horseflesh, is that a fact?”
I saw his eyes. When a human being is startled, the pupils may dilate, never the whole iris; I believe the entire structure of the eyeball is subtly different. My last doubt was gone. He said careless-carefully: “Oh yes, in a way…. Philosophy, huh?”
“Ah, philosophy!” Angelo chirped. “Here’s where we dish it out, Ben. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and state your problems in words of less than one syllable. Feuermann and Pontevecchio, brought here at enormous expense, will solve it in the merest flick of a hysteron proteron: they walk, they talk, they crawl upon their bellies like a rep-tyle. For a nominal fee, they look into the past, the future, even the present, your money back if not satisfied. Why, ladies and gentlemen, it was these seers, these incomparable counselors of the unseen world” — he was warming to it, and as friendly as a puppy chewing my shoe — “who recently unscrewed one of the most inscrutable riddles of suffering humanity, namely, who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.”
I asked him who did.
“Divil a soul,” said Angelo. “They fell in when she lost her temper, and Mr. Murphy entirely in them at the time.”
The image of Feuermann didn’t speak or smile. I said: “Try the future, Prophet. Andy’s got valve trouble, or maybe it’s the carburetor. So, how long before petroleum gets so scarce we go back to — horses?” Under my breath I added the Salvayan word for “horses,” so seldom used among us and always with the jar of indecency. It is onomatopoetic enough so that to Angelo it must have sounded like throat clearing. Namir’s Feuermann-face remained frozen in calm.
I cannot evade blame for that stupid error, Drozma. I might well have hidden the fact that I recognized him. I tossed away that clear advantage because of an anger for which no Observer can be excused.
“Now that’s a very good question,” said Angelo, and fingered an imaginary beard at his round chin. “I would say, sir, that the extrapolated eventuality will eventuate in the due course of events, not before.” I tried to listen to his nonsense, knowing that somewhere a warmhearted, harmless old man must be lying dead — hidden; buried, I supposed — solely because his death was useful to one who hated his breed. I wondered if Namir still possessed the dissolution-grenade he must have had when he resigned so long ago. Even the old style is quiet enough, and I know of no reason why it wouldn’t disintegrate a human body as easily as one of ours. If Namir had used that, human law would never catch up with him. And it must not, as I knew. What had seemed almost funny at the time of the burglary was so no longer. Americans are not casual with prisoners, who must submit to physical examinations and are autopsied after execution, I believe. Human criminals occasionally obliterate their fingerprints by surgery. From where I sat I could see that Namir had not done so: his fingers were, Martianly speaking, normal; that alone would start a blaze of curiosity, the moment our unlooped angular ridges appeared on a police record. And if he were cornered — Drozma, I cannot share your feeling that he would be deeply inhibited against betraying us.
He has become like a creature of no race, a law to himself, past reach of reason, loyalty, or compassion. What other sort of being could have gone through with the murder of Feuermann? (At the time I write this I have proof. I had none that afternoon, but a sickening certainty took the place of it, and proof, when I did find it was only a bloody period to a sentence already written.)
I tried again to listen to Angelo, who was bubbling merrily along like a little fountain in the sun: ” — and this invention, this crowning triumph of the Feuermann-Ponteveechio genius, is a simple, simple thing. Allow me to sketch the reasoning which led to the blinding consummation. Earthworms love onions. They are alliotropic, a term derived (as every schoolboy knows) from Allium, the botanical genus embracing the common or garden onion. Alliotropic — five dollars, please. We propose therefore to design light carts — ain’t flat-out done it yet on account we ain’t got the capital — for hitching to the rears of a calculated sufficiency of earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris). An onion will be supported on a pole in advance of the worms, which crawl in pursuit of it, applying traction to the cart. In the event of a halt one need only jump from the cart (assuming it is not moving at excessive speed), dig a hole in the ground, lower the onion into it. The worms will then go underground after it, but their harness will be so contrived that they can never reach it, thus obviating any replacement of the onion — but of course a good team of worms must be properly fed and cared for at all times. And whereas their strength will be insufficient to pull the cart underground, their efforts to do so will provide a gentle braking action and the cart will eventually come to rest. Why be old-fashioned? Why wear yourself out with uneconomical, unreliable, dangerous horses? Why suffer from horsemaid’s knee, when a trip to your nearest dealer will put you in possession of the streamlined, fur-lined, underlined, air-conditioned, trouble-free Feuermann-Ponteveechio wormobile?”
“Have you incorporated?”
“Not yet, Ben. We could let you in on the ground floor with a very nice proposition — and where’ve you been all day?”
“Listened in on Sharon’s piano practice. She has talent, Angelo.”
“So?” Sharon had been nowhere in his thoughts. “Can you tell?”
“The way she goes at it. The touch. She seems — dedicated. There aren’t so many things that call for that. The arts, the sciences. Politics, though not by the man in the street’s definition. Religion — again only if you have an intelligible definition of it.” Namir-Feuermann was deep in abstraction, the pipe gone out. “The study of ethics.”
“Dedication to the study of ethics,” said the old man’s voice. “Sounds like a formula for the care and feeding of prigs.”
“Why?” said the boy.
Namir faked a cough, and in the breathy noise I heard a whispered Salvayan word, the one best translated by the more polite English “Get out!” Then the image of Feuermann was smiling in kindly deprecation. “You’re not far enough along, Angelo. Wouldn’t beat my brains too much if I were you. Likely to make yourself introverted.” Namir was making a mistake there, and I could rejoice at it, seeing Angelo’s face veil itself in the resigned quiet that said: “Okay, sonny, I’m twelve.”
“Get around more, Angelo. Enlarge experience. As I was saying a while ago, everything is struggle. You’ll need to be out there in the middle of it more and more, not locked up in an ivory tower.” Well, the old railroad engineer had probably been familiar with that phrase. I decided that Angelo was not bothered by the change in him because conversation with the real Feuermann had probably never been very penetrating. The real Feuermann had offered undemanding affection and tolerance, but could hardly have treated Angelo as a mental adult. Now the old man’s attitude would seem to Angelo to be only a grown-up shift of mood. The physical disguise was perfect of course: trust Namir for that. He had even reproduced a tiny white scar at the hairline which few human eyes would ever have noticed.
I asked Angelo: “Would you say Beethoven was fighting anybody when he wrote the ‘Waldstein’?”
“Not prezactly.” Angelo was off his perch. “Grocery errand — the mighty brain just remembered.” I got up too, nodding politely to the one I intended to kill.
I justify this intention by the law of 27,140 — “harm to our people or to humanity.” I needed only proof of Feuermann’s death, then I could act. I would find a means to draw Namir away from human surroundings, and would use the extra grenade Supply gave me. Afterward I would sleep well. So I thought. I allowed myself no backward look as I closed the door and caught up with Angelo, expecting to find him still full of fun and unworried.
He wasn’t. He had started downstairs but came back before I spoke, and glanced at my door uneasily. “Could I stop in a minute?”
“Sure. What’s cooking, friend?”
“Oh, just ham and eggs.” But there wasn’t any laughter in him. He fidgeted around my room. In a comic way he had, he pulled down his upper lip with thumb and finger and pushed it from side to side. “I dunno…. Maybe everybody feels like two people, sometimes.”
“Sure. Two or more. Many selves in all of us.”
“But” — he looked up, and I saw he was genuinely frightened — “but it shouldn’t be — sharp. Should it, Ben? I mean — well, there in Uncle Jacob’s room, it was like—” He fussed with trifles on my bureau, to hide his face maybe; added miserably: “Wasn’t any errand at the store. I just wanted out…. I mean, Ben, there’s a me that likes it here — everything: living here, Sharon, Bill, the other kids, even school. And — well, especially the woods, and — oh, talking with you, and stuff….”
“And the other one would like…?”
“Chuck everything,” he whispered. “Just every damn thing and start fresh. In there, in that room, I was like — like cut down the middle. But that’s whacky, isn’t it? It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t really want to go anywhere else. If I could…”
“I think it’ll pass,” I said, finding no better words than these weak ones that could hardly help him.
“Oh, I guess.” He started to go.
“Wait a minute.” I took the wrapped mirror from the back of a bureau drawer. “Something you might like to look at. I brought it from Canada. When I taught history, Angelo, it was ancient history mostly. This thing was given me by a friend who knows his archaeology, who—” Drozma, I think I had been afraid of that mirror. That may be why I had never unwrapped it until this poorly chosen moment. Is it a product of accident or a lost art? Some subtle distortion in the bronze that compels many truths to cry aloud? I saw the young Elmis, the almost-good musician, the scatterbrained youth whom you taught so patiently, the persistent student of history, the absent-minded lover and husband, the clumsy Observer, the inadequate father. How can this be, in a poor frail artifact of the long-dead Minoan world? At other shifts of the mirror — oh, let that escape words. It is one thing to know, with the mind only, that one will be old, that one has different faces for victory, shame, death, hope, defeat; another thing to watch it brilliant in the bronze. I was lost there, seeking for what I was once at City of Oceans, when I heard Angelo say: “What’s the matter?”
“No, nothing.” I did not want to show it to him now, but it was passing from my silly fumbling fingers into his innocent brown ones, and I went on talking somehow: “It’s Minoan — anyway, came from Crete, likely made before Homer lived. You see, the patina’s been kept away — I mean, taken away, polished off, so it’s still a mirror as it was—”
He wasn’t hearing me. I saw him shaking, his face crumpled and twisted as if in nightmare. “Here, let me take the damn thing — I hadn’t looked in it before, myself. I didn’t know, Angelo. But it’s nothing to be afraid of—”
He twitched it away when I would have taken it, forced to stare in spite of himself. “Cheepus, what a—” He started laughing, and that was worse. I took it out of his hands then and flung it on the bureau.
“I ought to be kicked. But, Angelo, I didn’t know—”
He pulled away from my hand. “Look out — I’ll prob’ly erp.” He ran for the stairs. When I followed, he glanced back up out of the well of darkness and said: “It’s all right, Ben. I get whacky, that’s all. Forget it, will you?”
Forget it?