“But why, Rod, weren’t you as deep in as the others? I mean on the business of conquering Callisto and all of that?” she inquired. “You were free of that part of the hypnosis.”
Caquer shrugged.
“Maybe it was because I missed Skidder’s talk on the televis,” he suggested.
“Of course it wasn’t Skidder at all, it was Deem in another guise and wearing the helmet. And maybe he deliberately left me out, because he was having a psychopathic kind of fun out of my trying to investigate the murders of two Willem Deems. It’s hard to figure. Perhaps I was slightly cracked from the strain, and it might have been that for that reason I was partially resistant to the group hypnosis.”
“You think he really intended to try to rule all of Callisto, Rod?” asked the girl.
“We’ll never know, for sure, just how far he wanted, or expected to go later. At first, he was just experimenting with the powers of hypnosis, through the wheel. That first night, he sent people out of their houses into the streets, and then sent them back and made them forget it. Just a test, undoubtedly.” Caquer paused and frowned thoughtfully.
“He was undoubtedly psychopathic, though, and we don’t dare even guess what all his plans were,” he continued. “You understand how the goggles worked to neutralize the wheel, don’t you, Icicle?”
“I think so. That was brilliant, Rod. It’s like when you take a moving picture of a turning wheel, isn’t it? If the camera synchronizes with the turning of the wheel, so that each successive picture shows it after a complete revolution, then it looks like it’s standing still when you show the movie.”
Caquer nodded.
“That’s it exactly,” he said. “Just luck I had access to those goggles, though. For a second I could see a man wearing a helmet up there on the balcony—but that was all I had to know.”
“But Rod, when you rushed out on the balcony, you didn’t have the goggles on any more. Couldn’t he have stopped you, by hypnosis?”
“Well, he didn’t. I guess there wasn’t time for him to take over control of me. He did flash an illusion at me. It wasn’t either Barr Maxon or Willem Deem I saw standing there at the last minute. It was you, Jane.”
“I?”
“Yep, you. I guess he knew I’m in love with you, and that’s the first thing flashed into his mind—that I wouldn’t dare use the sword if I thought it was you standing there. But it wasn’t you, in spite of the evidence of my eyes, so I swung it.”
He shuddered slightly, remembering the will power he had needed to bring that sword down.
“The worst of it was that I saw you standing there like I’ve always wanted to see you—with your arms out toward me, and looking at me as though you loved me.”
“Like this, Rod?”
And this time he was not too dumb to get the idea.
Cartoonist
There were six letters in Bill Garrigan’s box, but he could tell from a quick glance at the envelopes that not one of them was a check. Would-be gags from would-be gagmen. And, nine chances out of ten, not a yak in the lot.
He carried them back to the adobe hut he called his studio before bothering to open them. He tossed his disreputable hat onto the two-burner kerosene stove. He sat down and twisted his legs around the legs of the kitchen chair before the rickety table which doubled as a place to eat and his drawing board.
It had been a long time since the last sale and he hoped, even though he didn’t dare expect, that there’d be a really salable gag in this lot. Miracles do happen.
He tore open the first envelope. Six gags from some guy up in Oregon, sent to him on the usual basis; if he liked any of them he’d draw them up and if they sold the guy got a percentage. Bill Garrigan looked at the first one. It read:
GUY AND GAL DRIVE UP TO RESTAURANT. SlGN ON CAR READS “HERMAN THE FIRE EATER.” THROUGH WINDOWS OF RESTAURANT PEOPLE EATING BY CANDLE LIGHT.
GUY! “OH, BOY, THIS LOOKS LIKE A GOOD PLACE TO EAT!”
Bill Garrigan groaned and looked at the next card. And the next. And the next. He opened the next envelope. And the next.
This was getting really bad. Cartooning is a tough racket to make a living in, even when you live in a little town in the Southwest where living doesn’t cost you much. And once you start slipping—well, the thing was a vicious circle. As your stuff was seen less and less often in the big markets, the best gagmen started sending their material elsewhere. You wound up with the leftovers, which, of course, put the skids under you that much worse.
He pulled the last gag from the final envelope. It read:
SCENE ON SOME OTHER PLANET. EMPEROR OF SNOOK, A HIDEOUS MONSTER, IS TALKING TO SOME OF HIS SCIENTISTS.
EMPEROR: “YES, I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU’VE DEVISED A METHOD OF VISITING EARTH, BUT WHO WOULD WANT TO WITH ALL THOSE HORRIBLE HUMANS LIVING THERE?”
Bill Garrigan scratched the end of his nose thoughtfully. It had possibilities. After all, the science-fiction market was growing like mad. And if he could draw these extra-terrestrial creatures hideous enough to bring out the gag—
He reached for a pencil and a piece of paper and started to sketch out a rough. The first version of the Emperor and his scientists didn’t look quite ugly enough. He crumpled up the paper and reached for another piece.
Let’s see. He could give each one of the monsters three heads, each head with six protruding, goggling eyes. Half-a-dozen stubby arms. Hmmm, not bad. Very long torsos, very short legs. Four apiece, front ones bending one way, back ones the other. Splay feet. Now how about the face, outside of the six eyes? Leave ’em blank below the eyes. A mouth, a big one, in the middle of the chest. That way a monster wouldn’t get to arguing with himself as to which head should do the eating.
He added a few quick lines for the background; he looked upon his work and it was good. Maybe too good; maybe editors would think their readers too squeamish to look upon such terrible monstrosities. And yet, unless he made them as horrible as he could, the gag would be lost.
In fact, maybe he could make them even a little more hideous. He tried, and found that he could.
He worked on the rough until he was sure he’d got as much as could be drawn out of the gag, found an envelope and addressed it to his best market—or what had been his best market up to several months ago when he’d started slipping. He’d made his last sale there fully two months ago. But maybe they’d take this one; Rod Corey, the editor, liked his cartoons a bit on the bizarre side.
Bill Garrigan had almost forgotten the submission by the time it came back almost six weeks later.
He tore open the envelope. The rough was there with a big red “O.K. Let’s have a finish,” scrawled to one side of it and with the initials “R. C.” beneath.
He’d eat again!
Bill made it back from the post office in double time, brushed the odds and ends of food, books, and clothing from the table top and reached for paper, pencil, pen, and ink.
He wedged the rough between a milk can and a dirty saucer to work from it, and he stared at it until he got himself back in the frame of mind he’d been in when he’d first roughed out the idea.
He did a job of it, because Rod Corey’s market was in there with the best; the only one that gave him a hundred bucks a crack. Of course some of the really top markets paid higher than that to name-cartoonists, but Bill Garrigan had lost any delusions of his own grandeur. Sure, he’d give his right arm to hit the top, but it didn’t seem likely to happen. And right now he’d settle for selling enough to keep him eating.