16
The blue prewar Plymouth halted by the curb, and Ferde Heinke hopped out and ran up the path and down the stairs and knocked on the door of the basement apartment. A light was on behind the shade of the living room window, and he knew either Rachel or Art was home. The door opened and Rachael, looking wan and listless, said, “Hi, Heinke.” Always shy in her presence, he scuffed his feet and said, “What say. Is Art around?”
“No,” she said.
“I sort of wanted to pick up the dummies.” She did not appear to understand, so he explained, “The dummies for Phantasmagoria; they’re around someplace. Art was working on them.”
“Oh,” she said “yes. He asked me to go over the spelling.” She held the door open and Ferde Heinke entered. “I’ll get them.”
Ill at ease, he waited for her. The apartment had a deserted quality, a lack of life. While he was standing around, he realized that a man was sitting in the corner with his legs stuck out, a grown man in a suit. At first he thought the man was asleep, and then he realized that the man was awake and looking at him.
“Hi,” Ferde Heinke murmured.
The man said, “Hi, Ferde.”
Recognizing Jim Briskin, he said, “How are you?”
“Not so good,” Jim Briskin said, and that was all.
Rachael appeared with the dummies. “Here,” she said, giving them. He accepted the dummies for his science fiction magazine, thanked her, and went off up the steps to the path.
Behind him Rachael shut the door of the apartment. He continued along the path, past the iron gate, to the car. At the wheel Joe Mantila said, “You didn’t stay long, anyhow.”
“He wasn’t home,” Ferde said, getting into the car.
They stopped at the lithograph shop, which was still open. The man behind the counter, fat and wearing suspenders and a colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up, inspected the dummies. His stubby fingers riffled the pages as Ferde Heinke and Joe Mantila stood circumspectly a short distance away.
“You want it folded and stapled, don’t you?” The man scratched estimates with a ballpoint pen. “How many copies?”
Ferde Heinke told him around two hundred, and the man wrote that down. He also wrote complicated figures about the number of pages, size of pages, and cryptic letters suggesting the weight of paper, the type of chemical process.
“Can we go look at how it works?” Ferde asked, interested as always in seeing printing processes.
“Sure,” the man said, smoking a malacrino cigarette. “Just keep out of the way.”
They wandered past the counter and saw the negatives of several dummies from local corporations, and then the actual photographing equipment. Next door was more interesting material; the Rube Goldberg folding-and-cutting machine was clanking away, and hundreds of pamphlets—all alike—were rattling down an inclined belt. The title of the pamphlet was “Tungsten in Time of War,” and it was put out by a factory in South San Francisco. The pamphlets hung astraddle the moving belt, and at the bottom they were mechanically collected into a pile. The room banged with the noise of the conveyer; metal arms reached and groped.
“It looks like a Martian,” Heinke said. “Or like Abe Merritt’s ‘The Metal Monster.’ I have that in the original edition; it was published in the October 1927 issue of Science and Invention under the title ‘The Metal Emperor.’ ”
“Yeah,” Joe Mantila said, not listening.
“Nobody hardly knows that,” Heinke went on, above the uproar.
“Where was Art?” Joe Mantila said.
“I don’t know. He was out.”
“If I was married to a girl like her,” Joe Mantila said, “I sure wouldn’t be out.”
“That’s no lie,” Ferde Heinke said.
They got their estimate and left the bindery. As they walked back to the car, Joe Mantila noticed a flat manila folder under Heinke’s arm.
“Didn’t you give him that?”
“No,” Heinke said.
“What is it?”
“A story,” Heinke said, becoming instantly cautious. “What kind of story?”
“Science fiction, of course. I wrote it all last week. It runs five hundred words.” He clutched the folder with both hands. “It’s pretty good.”
“Let’s see it,” Joe Mantila said.
An evasiveness crept over Heinke. “No soap.”
“What’s it for?”
“I’m going to submit it to Astounding.”
“If they print it, everybody’ll read it.” Mantila stuck out his hand. “Let’s have it, come on.”
Heinke stalled. “It stinks.”
“What’s it called?”
“ ‘The Peeping Man.’ ”
“What’s that mean?”
Heinke struggled. “That’s the lead character. He’s a mutant, with psionic powers. He can see into alternate Earths. The whole world is destroyed and in ruins, and he sees Earths in which there was no war. It’s not exactly original, but it has a new twist.”
Joe Mantila grabbed the folder from Heinke. “I’ll give it back to you tomorrow; you can submit it then.”
“Give that back, you shit.” Heinke snatched it angrily. “Come on, goddamn you.” The two of them struggled, during which the folder was dropped, stepped on, picked up, dropped again. Joe Mantila tripped Heinke, and Heinke fell sprawling, still trying to catch hold of his folder.
“You!” Heinke yelled from the pavement.
“Why don’t you want me to see it?” Mantila said, gathering up the crumpled sheets. “What’s there that you don’t want anybody to find out?”
Sullenly Heinke climbed to his feet. “When you show things to people you know”—he brushed off his jeans—“they always say it’s about them.”
“Is it about me?”
Heinke plodded along toward the car. “A writer has to gather his materials where he finds them.”
Joe Mantila gave him a swift kick in the rump. “If it’s about me, I’ll deball you.”
“And I’ll sue you for assault and battery, and for theft of my manuscript. How about that?” As he got into the Plymouth, he said, “It’s not about you.”
“Who then?”
After, a long time Heinke muttered, “It’s about Rachael.”
Joe Mantila snorted. “Goddamn, that’s a laugh. You been thinking about her?”
“It’s about her and Art.”
“No kidding.” Seated behind the wheel, Joe Mantila began to read the manuscript:
Col. Throckmorton’s glance turned involuntarily in the direction of the triple-locked chamber around which armed soldiers in uniform with blasters kept a 24 hour vigil. No man had gone into that room. Earth’s last hope was in that room. And the door was sealed.
What thoughts went through the Col.’s head? There was no turning back. They had gone too far. The room contained Earth’s one hope for salvation from the ruins to which the 3-rd world war between Russia and America had brought it.
“It’s eerie,” the Col. trembled. “Is he demon or a god? Sometimes I don’t know which. I tell you, Lt., I haven’t closed my eyes in sleep in days. I hesitate to trust the fate of mankind to that Being. We know nothing about him, Lt. How can homo sapiens understand homo superior? It’s beyond comprehension.”
“But perhaps he can save us.” The Lt.’s voice was quiet as he spoke. “If he wants to.”
In the room sat a man. Head bowed, the man was thinking. His name—Ronald Manchester. He was 23 years old and the Psionic power within him had flowered at last to full bloom. But he was not thinking of that. He was thinking how he was the most powerful human in the world—yet not a human but an incredibly unique godlike superman who could save Earth. He was seeing past the mundane world in which ordinary man lived, he was seeing into an almost unbelievable other universe whose beauty was hidden to all save him.