“I know that, your excellency,” Bass said as solemnly as he could. “I’m certain I won’t change my mind.”
“Good. Very good. Now, let’s see… .” He flipped the pages of the dossier, one after another, studied something on the last one, folded them down again. “Tell me, Bass, how do you get along with your angel?”
BASS had half-expected the question, but he felt his ears growing red. “I —haven’t seen him for years, Your Excellency.”
“H-m. Yes. Well, that’s nothing to be ashamed of, Bass. You’re what is known as an ‘inherently stable’ type: It’s rather rare, though not as much so as it used to be, but it isn’t anything that need interfere with your career. On the contrary, we’re always on the lookout for personalities of your type, I’ll tell you in confidence; they do very well in the restricted sciences.
“Well—” the Archdeputy leaned over, picked up something from the floor beside him and put it carefully on the desk: it was an oblong box-shape, a foot high, draped in a yellow cloth.
“Stand up, Bass … come a little nearer. That’s it. Now don’t be frightened. Do just as I tell you, and we’ll be all right.”
Without warning, Laudermilk whipped the yellow cloth free of the box. It was frontless.
Inside, vivid against the black-enameled metal, stood a red plastic bag, labeled in yellow:
MARMON’S BEST
SEEDLESS HYBRID RAISINS
1 POUND
Cr./45
But in the upper right-hand corner, instead of the familiar red and white “GP” for “General Products,” was an obscenity: a yellow circle with a spidery black “U/M” inside it.
“Pick it up!” said the Archdeputy sharply.
Bass’s head felt suddenly very large and light; his lips and tongue, especially, felt impossibly enlarged, as if they were balloons that somebody had blown up. His feet were a long way away. He swayed, and righted himself with difficulty. “Pick it up!” said the Archdeputy again.
Bass stretched out his hand to the red bag: It seemed to take a long time, and yet he wished passionately that he dared make it go more slowly. His fingers were within an inch of the thing; half an inch—
He screamed and snatched his hand back.
He was groveling on the floor in an ecstasy of fear, blubbering and sobbing, tears leaking between the fingers he had clamped over his eyes.
“No!” he shouted. “I never will. I never will again!”
“There, son, there. It’s all right.” Hands were under his armpits, lifting him; he groped behind him for the chair and slumped down with his face in his hands.
“Take your time.”
Bass scrubbed his face with the palms of his hands and sat up straight again. He was still shaking; his eyelids were swollen and his vision blurred.
“Tell me what he said to you, son.”
Bass swallowed heavily. Thoughts were swirling in his hands like trails of phosphorescence in dark water; they moved too quickly to follow, and yet he knew that he had to speak.
The words came. “He—he had a sword that was all dripping with fire,” he said. “But it was his face that was the worst. He said, ‘If you ever do that again, Arthur Bass, I will kill you.’ ”
“How many times did he say it?”
How many … ? “Three times. Then he went away.” Bass shuddered and lowered his head again for an instant.
“All right. Now, I’m sorry I had to put you through that, but we have to be sure. You’ll do, Bass. Let’s see, where —yes, here’s the list. Bass, Arthur D. Dossier TD03080510.”
Then there was something about termination pay, and plane reservations, and the Archdeputy shaking his hand; and then he was walking out past the paste-headed secretary and the rows of people in the outer office, blind to their stares.
IT WAS still early in the afternoon I when he emerged from the colossal northern face of the Stamford Store; the lesser buildings that clustered around it, pebbles beside a boulder, were joined by short, violet-tinged shadows, harshly outlined on the clean glitter of vitrin and stone.
He turned up the High Street, past a row of lumpish service shops and offices, past the County Bakery, poisoning the air with freshness; past the Guard station and the cinema, into the residential area: two-and three-story frame houses, for the most part, gleaming with new paint but sagging out of plumb. Old houses—two hundred years old, many of them. They had a faint smell that no amount of deodorant could eradicate—a mustiness, a smell of memories and decay.
The quality of the light changed imperceptibly as he walked; from blue the sky turned golden, outlines softened and blurred, the shadows became mere rudly smudges. Everything was bright, hazy and depthless, like the golden landscapes in old paintings; the few people in the streets walked with bright haloes around them.
Rain began to fall in the full sunlight, so thin and gentle that Bass was scarcely aware of it until the moisture began to drip from his hat-brim.
He opened his pouch automatically and took out his raincoat; he pulled its folds apart awkwardly, so that it tore at the shoulder seam. He put it on anyhow. Better to be seen with a cheap coat than a torn one. Better to be seen with a torn coat than with none at all. …”
HE PASSED through the ring of new apartment houses that surrounded what was left of the park, and walked up one of the curving paths until he reached the bench, screened by a clump of alders, where he sometimes met Gloria on her way home from the bakery. There was no use waiting for her now; she wasn’t on the Sunday crew. She’d be in Store now, or helping with Sunday dinner, like everybody else —but the bench was sheltered by the trees’ overhang, and fairly dry, and he sat on it.
He tried to think about it clearly.
Incredible, incredible … he had put out his hand to the bag, thinking about nothing but the effort it took, watching for his angel to appear—and then suddenly, without any transition, he had known:
There was no angel.
The Man Without an Angel—the book they had studied in the fourth year, in Miss Davenport’s class. She had a brown mole on her cheek, with two hairs growing out of it.
No angel.
But until that instant, even though he hadn’t seen his angel since he was nine or ten, he’d believed that was simply because he’d never tried to do anything wrong—hadn’t he? And yet something in his mind, something of which he was not even conscious, had taken over then, smoothly, without hesitating a second—had sent him back screaming and wallowing on the floor—and when he was questioned, had put the words into his mouth: words from an old book he’d found in his father’s study, dusty years ago—The Detection of Demons. Something in his mind… .
A demon!
So this is what it feels like, he told himself numbly. But he felt no difference: no unholy ecstasy, no thrill of evil along his nerves. He looked at his hands, pinched his cheeks. They were the same.
But there must be some mistake! If he had waited an instant longer; if his hand had come a fraction of an inch closer to the bag—
Well, that could be tested.
Uneasily, Bass looked around him. No one was near; no one on the path or the lawns; nothing but the luminous pearl-gray curtain of rain.
He clenched his jaws. Unwillingly forcing the words, he ground out: “General Products … are no good.”
It was true, then. He could say the hideous words again, he knew he could say worse things; he could do worse things; no angel would stop him.
He could kill. He could strip himself in public. He could expose himself needlessly to danger. He could make love to a woman without marrying her first. He could insult a Salesman, or even an Executive or a Stockholder.