He said, "We were talking about wiring."
Naylor said, "Yes. Well, as I said, I've been considering your company. I've got to talk it over with the production boys, you understand. I'll let you know."
"Sure," said Marten, infinitely depressed. Naylor wouldn't let him know. The whole thing was shot.
And yet, through and beyond his depression, there was still that restlessness.
The hell with Naylor. All Marten wanted was to break this up and get on with it. (Get on with what? But the question was only a whisper. Whatever did the questioning inside him was ebbing away, dying down…)
The lunch frayed to an ending. If they had greeted each other like long-separated friends at last reunited, they parted like strangers.
Marten felt only relief.
He left with pulses thudding, threading through the tables, out of the haunted building, onto the haunted street.
Haunted? Madison Avenue at 1:20 p.m. in an early fall afternoon with the sun shining brightly and ten thousand men and women be-hiving its long straight stretch.
But Marten felt the haunting. He tucked his briefcase under his arm and headed desperately northward. A last sigh of the normal within him warned him he had a three o'clock appointment on 36th Street. Never mind. He headed uptown. Northward.
At 54th Street, he crossed Madison and walked west, came abruptly to a halt and looked upward.
There was a sign on the window, three stories up. He could make it out clearly: a. s. lefkowich, certified accountant.
It had an F and an OW, but it was the first "-ich" ending he had seen. The first one. He was getting closer. He turned north again on Fifth Avenue, hurrying through the unreal streets of an unreal city, panting with the chase of something, while the crowds about him began to fade.
A sign in a ground floor window, m. r. lefkowicz, m.d.
A small gold-leaf semi-circle of letters in a candy-store window: jacob levkow.
(Half a name, he thought savagely. Why is he disturbing me with half a name?)
The streets were empty now except for the varying clan of Lefkowitz, Levkowitz, Lefkowicz to stand out in the vacuum.
He was dimly aware of the park ahead, standing out in painted motionless green. He turned west. A piece of newspaper fluttered at the corner of his eyes, the only movement in a dead world. He veered, stooped, and picked it up, without slackening his pace.
It was in Yiddish, a torn half-page.
He couldn't read it. He couldn't make out the blurred Hebrew letters, and could not have read it if they were clear. But one word was clear. It stood out in dark letters in the center of the page, each letter clear in its every serif. And it said Lefkovitsch, he knew, and as he said it to himself, he placed its accent on the second syllable: Lef-KUH-vich.
He let the paper flutter away and entered the empty park.
The trees were still and the leaves hung in odd, suspended attitudes. The sunlight was a dead weight upon him and gave no warmth.
He was running, but his feet kicked up no dust and a tuft of grass on which he placed his weight did not bend.
And there on a bench was an old man; the only man in the desolate park. He wore a dark felt cap, with a visor shading his eyes. From underneath it, tufts of gray hair protruded His grizzled beard reached the uppermost button of his rough jacket. His old trousers were patched, and a strip of burlap was wrapped about each worn and shapeless shoe.
Marten stopped. It was difficult to breathe. He could only say one word and he used it to ask his question: "Levkovich?"
He stood there, while the old man rose slowly to his feet; brown old eyes peering close.
"Marten," he sighed. "Samuel Marten. You have come." The words sounded with an effect of double exposure, for under the English, Marten heard the faint sigh of a foreign tongue. Under the "Samuel" was the unheard shadow of a "Schmu-el."
The old man's rough, veined hands reached out, then withdrew as though he were afraid to touch. "I have been looking but there are so many people in this wilderness of a city-that-is-to-come. So many Martins and Martines and Mortons and Mertons. I stopped at last when I found greenery, but for a moment only-I would not commit the sin of losing faith. And then you came."
"It is I," said Marten, and knew it was. "And you are Phinehas Levkovich. Why are we here?"
"I am Phinehas ben Jehudah, assigned the name Levkovich by the ukase of the Tsar that ordered family names for all. And we are here," the old man said, softly, "because I prayed. When I was already old, Leah, my only daughter, the child of my old age, left for America with her husband, left the knouts of the old for the hope of the new. And my sons died, and Sarah, the wife of my bosom, was long dead and I was alone. And the time came when I, too, must die. But I had not seen Leah since her leaving for the far country and word had come but rarely. My soul yearned that I might see sons born unto her; sons of my seed; sons in whom my soul might yet live and not die."
His voice was steady and the soundless shadow of sound beneath his words was the stately roll of an ancient language.
"And I was answered and two hours were given me that I might see the first son of my line to be born in a new land and in a new time. My daughter's daughter's daughter's son, have I found you, then, amidst the splendor of this city?"
"But why the search? Why not have brought us together at once?"
"Because there is pleasure in the hope of the seeking, my son," said the old man, radiantly, "and in the delight of the finding. I was given two hours in which I might seek, two hours in which I might find… and behold, thou art here, and I have found that which I had not looked to see in life." His voice was old, caressing. "Is it well with thee, my son?"
"It is well, my father, now that I have found thee," said Marten, and dropped to his knees. "Give me thy blessing, my father, that it may be well with me all the days of my life, and with the maid whom I am to take to wife and the little ones yet to be born of my seed and thine."
He felt the old hand resting lightly on his head and there was only the soundless whisper.
Marten rose. The old man's eyes gazed into his yearningly. Were they losing focus?
"I go to my fathers now in peace, my son," said the old man, and Marten was alone in the empty park.
There was an instant of renewing motion, of the Sun taking up its interrupted task, of the wind reviving, and even with that first instant of sensation, all slipped back- At ten of noon, Sam Marten hitched his way out of the taxicab, and found himself groping uselessly for his wallet while traffic inched on.
A red truck slowed, then moved on. A white script on its side announced: F. Lewkowitz and Sons, Wholesale Clothiers.
Marten didn't see it. Yet somehow he knew that all would be well with him. Somehow, as never before, he knew…
This one is complicated. It goes back to 1938-39 when, for some half a dozen issues or so, a magazine I won't name tried to make a go of what I can only call "spicy science fiction stories." Considering the sexual freedom allowed the writers of today, those old spicy s.f. stories read like "The Bobbsey Twins in Outer Space" now, but they were sizzlers to the magazine's few readers then.
The stories dealt very heavily with the hot passion of alien monsters for Earthwomen. Clothes were always getting ripped off and breasts were described in a variety of elliptical phrases. (Yes, I know that's a pun.) The magazine died a deserved death, not so much for its sex and sadism, as for the deadly sameness of its stories and the abysmal quality of its "writing."
The curtain falls, and rises again in 1960. The magazine Playboy decided to have a little fun with science fiction. They published an article entitled "Girls for the Slime God" in which they pretended (good-naturedly) that all science fiction was sex and sadism. They could find very little real stuff to satirize, however, for until 1960 there was no branch of literature anywhere (except perhaps for the children's stories in Sunday school bulletins) as puritanical as science fiction. Since 1960, to be sure, sexual libertarianism has penetrated even science fiction.