“What?”
“It’s a false angina, I think. But take the pill. But-“ he passed a hand over his eyes-“You thought I was electrocuted, and you wondered how to straighten out my last bill. It’s a fair bill, Wilmot. I didn’t overcharge you.” Flowers opened his eyes very wide and said, “The newsboy on the corner cheated me out of my change. He-“ He swallowed and said, “The cops in the squad car just turning off Fulton Street don’t like my having white patients. One of them is thinking about running in a girl that came here.” He sobbed, “It didn’t stop, Wilmot.”
“For Christ’s sake, Myrion, lie down.”
“It didn’t stop. It’s not like a radio. You can’t turn it off. Now I can hear-everybody! Every mind for miles around is pouring into my head WHAT IT THINKS ABOUT ME-ABOUT ME-ABOUT US!”
Ensal Brubacker, who had been a clinical psychologist and not a radio engineer, had not intended his helmet to endure the strain of continuous operation nor had he thought to provide circuit-breakers. It had been meant to operate for a few moments at most, enough to reroute a few neurons, open a blocked path or two. One of its parts overheated. Another took too much load as a result, and in a moment the thing was afire. It blew the fuses and the room was in darkness. The elderly ex-Corporation Counsel managed to get the fire out, and then picked up the phone. Shouting to be heard over the screaming of Myrion Flowers, he summoned a Kings County ambulance. They knew Flowers’s name. The ambulance was there in nine minutes.
Flowers died some weeks later in the hospital-not Kings County, but he did not know the difference. He had been under massive sedation for almost a month until it became a physiological necessity to taper him off; and as soon as he was alert enough to do so he contrived to hang himself in his room.
His funeral was a state occasion. The crowds were enormous and there was much weeping. The Corporation Counsel was one of those permitted to cast a clod of earth upon the bronze casket, but he did not weep.
No one had ever figured out what the destroyed instrument was supposed to have been, and Wilmot did not tell. There are inventions and inventions, he thought, and reading minds is a job for white men. If even for white men. In the world of Myrion Flowers many seeds might sturdily grow, but some ripe fruits would mature into poison.
No doubt the machine might have broken any mind, listening in on every thought that concerned one. It was maddening and dizzying, and the man who wore the helmet would be harmed in any world; but only in the world of Myrion Flowers would he be hated to death.
The Gift of Garigolli
This is the last story of the posthumous collaborations to be published, and in one sense it is the most dated of them. It is a pretty damn sexist story. Shirl is Dorothy Vaneman Seaton out of Anita Loos: pretty, kind, charming and possessed of the I.Q. of a toad. Nobody would have written this story in the 1970’s, not Cyril, and certainly not I, and over a good many years I would from time to time look at the tattered manuscript again and try to find some way of detoxifying it. There never was one. There was a great deal of brightness and charm, but it was all bound up in the empty-headedness of Shirl. I couldn’t change that without destroying everything Cyril had put on paper, and so I finally took my courage in my hands, pretended that it was 1953 instead of 1973 and finished it up.
Garigolli to Home Base
Greeting, Chief,
I’m glad you’re pleased with the demographics and cognitics studies. You don’t mention the orbital mapping, but I suppose that’s all complete and satisfactory.
Now will you please tell me how we’re going to get off this lousy planet?
Keep firmly in mind, Chief, that we’re not complainers. You don’t have a better crew anywhere in the Galaxy and you know it. We’ve complied with the Triple Directive, every time, on every planet we’ve explored. Remember Arcturus XII? But this time we’re having trouble. After all, look at the disproportion in mass. And take a look at the reports we’ve sent in. These are pretty miserable sentients, Chief.
So will you let us know, please, if there has ever been an authorized exception to Directive Two? I don’t mean we aren’t going to bust a link to comply- if we can-but frankly, at this moment, I don’t see how.
And we need to get out of here fast.
Garigolli
Although it was a pretty morning in June, with the blossoms dropping off the catalpa trees and the algae blooming in the twelve-foot plastic pool, I was not enjoying either my breakfast or the morning mail.
The letter from the lawyer started, the way letters from lawyers do, with
RE: GUDSELL VS. DUPOIR
and went on to advise Dupoir (that’s me, plus my wife and our two-year-old son Butchie) that unless a certified check arrived in Undersigned’s office before close of business June llth (that was tomorrow) in the amount of $14,752.03, Undersigned would be compelled to institute Proceedings at once.
I showed it to my wife, Shirl, for lack of anything better to do.
She read it and nodded intelligently. “He’s really been very patient with us, considering,” she said. “I suppose this is just some more lawyer-talk?”
It had occurred to me, for a wild moment, that maybe she had $14,752.03 in the old sugar bowl as a surprise for me, but I could see she didn’t. I shook my head. “This means they take the house,” I said. “I’m not mad any more. But you won’t sign anything for your brother after this, will you?”
“Certainly not,” she said, shocked. “Shall I put that letter in the paper-recycling bin?”
“Not just yet,” I said, taking off my glasses and hearing aid. Shirl knows perfectly well that I can’t hear her when my glasses are off, but she kept on talking anyway as she wiped the apricot puree off Butchie’s chin, rescued the milk glass, rinsed the plastic infant-food jar and dropped it in the “plastics” carton, rinsed the lid and put it in the “metals” box and poured my coffee. We are a very ecological household. It astonishes me how good Shirl is at things like that, considering.
I waved fruit flies away from the general direction of my orange juice and put my glasses back on in time to catch her asking, wonderingly, “What would they do with our house? I mean, I’m not a demon decorator like Ginevra Freedman. I just like it comfortable and neat.”
“They don’t exactly want the house,” I explained. “They just want the money they’ll get after they sell it to somebody else.” Her expression cleared at once. Shirl always likes to understand things.
I sipped my coffee, fending off Butchie’s attempt to grab the cup, and folded the letter and laid it across my knees like an unsheathed scimitar, ready to taste the blood of the giaour, which it kind of was. Butchie indicated that he would like to eat it, but I didn’t see that that would solve the problem. Although I didn’t have any better way of solving it, at that.
I finished the orange juice, patted Butchie’s head and, against my better judgment, gave Shirl the routine kiss on the nose.
“Well,” she said, “I’m glad that’s settled. Isn’t it nice the way the mail comes first thing in the morning now?”
I said it was very nice and left for the bus but, really, I could have been just as happy if Undersigned’s letter had come any old time. The fruit flies were pursuing me all the way down the street. They seemed to think they could get nourishment out” of me, which suggested that fruit flies were about equal in intelligence to brothers-in-law. It was not a surprising thought. I had thought it before.
Garigolli to Home Base