A Saucer of Loneliness (28 page)

Croy was standing white-faced in the doorway. “What’s she say? What’s koala mean?”

“It means a great deal. Turn him over and look at him, Croy. Maybe you’ll remember where you saw him.”

Croy bent down and rolled the heavy body over. “He’s dead!”

Killilea left the bed and ran to Croy, knelt down. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” He picked up a broken tube of glass, looked at it, laid it down on the carpet. Then he began running his fingers lightly over the front of the man’s coat.

“Careful,” said Croy.

“Oh, but yes. Here it is.” Slowly and cautiously he unbuttoned jacket, vest and shirt. The undershirt showed a small blood spot, just a drop. From its center extended the needle. Using his handkerchief folded twice, Killilea grasped it and pulled it out. It had penetrated only a fraction of an inch. “Far enough,” said Killilea and Croy gave an understanding grunt.

“Heart trouble,” said Killilea.

Croy said, “You’re still going to have … two bodies … to explain. And you don’t even know who this one is.”

“Yes I do,” said Killilea. “You do too, if you’ll only look at him.” He bent close. “Brown-tinted contact lenses,” he said. “I think his eyes are blue. Right, Prue?”

She gave a long, shuddering sigh. “Yes,” she whispered. “And he had a beard to hide that little chin.”

“Beard,” said Croy, and then dropped to his knees.
“Dr. Pretorio
!”

“It had to be. Now I feel like the boys at that dinner table where Columbus demonstrated how to stand an egg on end.”

“But he’s … he was dead!”

“When we get his coffin dug up—if we bother—we’ll find out who really was buried at Pretorio’s funeral,” said Killilea. “If anyone.”

“Why?” moaned Croy.

Killilea stood up and dusted off his hands. “Thought a lot of him, didn’t you, Croy? Why did he do it? I guess we’ll never know in detail. But I’d say his mind snapped. He got afraid of the Board, really his own creation, when he discovered my factor, and wanted it for himself. The Board needed wrecking, and he threw his own supposed death on the wreckage, along with his great reputation. A mind like that, working against society instead of for it, would be happier operating underground. I wonder what he would have done with the factor?”

“He told me last week that the reorganized Board could run the world,” said Croy in a small voice. “I thought he was flattering me. I thought it was a figure of speech. Oh, God. Pretorio.” Tears ran down his face.

“You’ll have to give me a hand,” said Killilea. “We’ll get him down to his car and leave him in it. And that will be that.”

“All right … do I have time?” asked Croy.

Killilea came to him. “Let’s see your tongue. Mmmm-hm!” He lifted Croy’s damp wrist and looked thoughtful. “In your condition, I’d give you about forty more years.”

Croy simply looked at him blankly. Killilea slapped him on the shoulder. “Maybe it’s morals, and maybe it’s ethics,” he said kindly, “but neither Prue nor I could sit and talk while we watched a man die. You got an injection of dilute caffeine citrate to sweat you up, and some adrenaline to make you tingle.”

Croy’s jaw opened and closed ludicrously. At last he said, “But I’m supposed to … I have to pay for.…”

Killilea laughed. “Listen, philosopher. If you really feel nice and guilty and want to get punished—live with it, don’t die for it just so you can escape all those sleepless nights.”

Then Croy began to laugh.…

Together they got the heavy body downstairs while Prue scouted ahead. They saw no one, though they had a drunken-friend story ready. They arranged the corpse carefully behind the wheel and left it.

Back in the foyer of the apartment house, Killilea asked, “Which way do you go?”

“Bilville.”

“You can’t go all the way out there this late!” Prue cried. “Go back upstairs. You can make yourself quite comfortable there. There’s orange juice in the refrigerator, and the clean towels are—”

“But won’t you—”

“No,” said Killilea flatly, “she won’t. I’m taking my wife home.”

T
HE WORLD ENDED AT THAT DAMN PARTY OF
B
ECK
’
S
.

At least if it had fallen into the sun, or if it had collided with a comet, it would have been all right with me. I mean, I’d have been able to look at that fellow in the barber chair, and that girl on the TV screen, and somebody fresh from Tasmania, and I’d have been able to say, “Ain’t it hell, neighbor?” and he would’ve looked at me with sick eyes, feeling what I felt about it.

But this was much worse. Where you sit and look around, that’s the center of the whole universe. Everything you see from there circles around you, and you’re the center. Other people share a lot of it, but they’re circling around out there too. The only one who comes right in and sits with you, looking out from the same place, is the one you love. That’s your world. Then one night you’re at a party and the one you love disappears with a smooth-talking mudhead; you look around and they’re gone; you worry and keep up the bright talk; they come back and the mudhead calls you “old man” and is too briskly polite to you, and she—she won’t look you in the eye. So the center of the universe is suddenly one great big aching nothing, nothing at all—it’s the end of your world. The whole universe gets a little shaky then, with nothing at its center.

Of course, I told myself, this is all a crazy suspicion, and you, Tom Conway, ought to hang your head and apologize. This sort of thing happens to people, but not to us. Women do this to their husbands, but Opie doesn’t do this to me—does she,
does she?

We got out of there as soon as I could manage it without actually pushing Opie out like a wheelbarrow. We left party noises behind us, and I remember one deep guttural laugh especially that I took extremely personally, though I knew better. It was black dark outside, and we had to feel the margins of the path through our soles
before our eyes got accustomed to the night. Neither of us said anything. I could almost sense the boiling, bottled-up surging agony in Opie, and I knew she felt it in me, because we always felt things in each other that way.

Then we were through the arched gateway in the hedge and there was concrete sidewalk under us instead of gravel. We turned north toward where the car was parked and I glanced quickly at her. All I could see was the turn of her throat, curved a bit more abruptly than usuaI because of the stiff, controlled way she was holding her head.

I said to myself, something’s happened here and it’s bad. Well, I’ll have to ask her. I know, I thought, with a wild surge of hope, I’ll ask her what happened; I’ll ask her if it was the worst possible thing, and she’ll say no, and then I’ll ask her if it’s the next worse, and so on, until when I get to it I’ll be able to say things aren’t so bad after all.

So I said, “You and that guy, did you—” and all the rest of it, in words of one syllable. The thing I’m grateful to her about is that she didn’t let one full second of silence go by before she answered me.

She said, “Yes.”

And that was the end of the world.

The end of the world is too big a thing to describe in detail. It’s too big a thing to remember clearly. The next thing that happened, as far as I can recall, is that there was gravel under my feet again and party noises ahead of me, and Opie sprinting past me and butting me in the chest to make me stop. “Where are you going?” she gasped.

I pushed her but she bounded right back against me. “Get out of the way,” I said, and the sound of my voice surprised me.

“Where are you going?” she said again.

“Back there,” I said. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Why?”

I didn’t answer that because there wasn’t room inside me for such a question, but she said, “He didn’t do it by himself, Tom. I was … I probably did more than he did. Kill me.”

I looked down at the faint moon-glimmer that told where her face was. I whispered, because my voice wouldn’t do anything else, “I don’t want to kill you, Opie.”

She said, with an infinite weariness, “There’s less reason to kill him. Come on. Let’s go—” I thought she was going to say “home,” and winced, but she realized as much as I did that the word didn’t mean anything anymore. “Let’s go,” she said.

When the world ends it doesn’t do it once and finish with the business. It rises up and happens again, sometimes two or three times in a minute, sometimes months apart but for days at a time. It did it to me again then, because the next thing I can remember is driving the car. Next to me where Opie used to sit was just a stretch of seat-cushion. Where there used to be a stretch of seat-cushion, over next to the right-hand door, Opie sat.

Back there in the path Opie had asked me a one-word question, and in me there was no room for it. Now, suddenly, there was no room in me for anything else. The word burst out of me, pressed out by itself.

“Why?”

Opie sat silently. I waited until I couldn’t stand it any longer and then looked over at her. A streetlight fled past and the pale gold wash of it raced across her face. She seemed utterly composed, but her eyes were too wide, and I sensed that she’d held them that way long enough for the eyeballs to dry and hurt her. “I asked you why,” I snarled.

“I heard you,” she said gently. “I’m just trying to think.”

“You don’t know why?”

She shook her head.

I looked straight through the windshield again and wrenched the wheel. I’d damned near climbed a bank. I was going too fast, too. I knew she’d seen it coming, and she hadn’t moved a muscle to stop it. I honestly don’t think she cared just then.

I got the car squared away and slowed down a little. “You’ve got to know why. A person doesn’t just—just go ahead and—and do something without a reason.”

“I did,” she said in that too-tired voice.

I’d already said that people don’t just do things that way, so there was no point in going over it again. Which left me nothing further to say. Since she offered nothing more, we left it like that.

A couple of days later Hank blew into my office. He shut the door, which people don’t usually do, and came over and half-sat on the desk, swinging one long leg. “What happened?” he said.

Hank is my boss, a fine guy, and Opie’s brother.

“What happened to who?” I asked him. I was as casual as a guy can be who is rudely being forced to think about something he’s trying to wall up.

He wagged his big head. “No games, Tom. What happened?”

I quit pretending. “So that’s where she is. Home to mother, huh?”

“Have you been really interested in where she is?”

“Cut it out, Hank. This ‘have you hurt my little sister, you swine’ routine isn’t like you.”

He had big amber eyes like Opie’s, and it was just as hard to tell what flexed and curled behind them. Finally he said, “You know better than that. You and Opie are grownups and usually behave like grownups.”

“We’re not now?”

“I don’t know. Tom, I’m not trying to protect Opie. Not from you. I know you both too well.”

“So what
are
you trying to do?”

“I just want to know what happened.”

“Why?” I rapped. There it was again: why, why, why.

He scratched his head. “Not to get sloppy about it, I want to know because I think that you and Opie are the two finest bipeds that ever got together to make a fine combo. I have one of these logical minds. A fact plus a fact plus a force gives a result. If you know all the facts, you can figure the result. I’ve been thinking for a lot of years that I know all the facts about both of you, everything that matters. And this—this just doesn’t figure. Tom, what happened?”

He was beginning to annoy me. “Ask Opie,” I spat. It sounded ugly. Why not? It was ugly.

Hank swung the foot and looked at me. I suddenly realized that this guy was miserable. “I did ask her,” he said in a choked voice.

I waited.

“She told me.”

That rocked me. “She told you what?”

“What happened. Saturday night, at Beck’s party.”

“She told you?” I couldn’t get over that. “What in time made her tell you?”

“I made her. She held out for a long while and then let me have it, in words of one syllable. I guess it was to shut me up.”

I put my head in my hands. It made a difference to have someone else in on it. I didn’t know whether I cared for the difference or not.

I jumped up then and yelled at him. “So you know what happened and you came bleating in here what happened, what happened! Why ask me, if you know?”

“You got me wrong, Tom,” he said. His voice was so soft against my yelling that it stopped me like a cut throat. “Yeah, I know what she did. What I want to know is what happened to make her do it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Have you talked to anyone about it?” he wanted to know.

I shook my head.

He spread his hands. “Talk to me about it.”

When I didn’t move, he leaned closer. “What do you say, Tom?”

“I say,” I breathed, “that I got work to do. We have a magazine to get out. This is company time, remember?”

He got up off the desk right away. Did you ever listen to someone walk away from you when you weren’t looking at him, and know by his footsteps that he was hurt and angry?

He opened the door and hesitated. “Tom …”

“What?”

“If you’ve got nothing to do this evening … call me. I’ll come over.”

I glared at him. “Fat chance.”

He didn’t say anything else. Just went away. I sat there staring at the open door. Here was a guy bragging how much he knew about me. Thinking I’d want to call him, talk to him.

Fat chance.

I didn’t call him, either. Not until after eight o’clock. His phone didn’t get through the first ring. He must have been sitting with his hand on it. “Hank?” I said.

He said, “I’ll be right over,” and hung up.

I had drinks ready when he got there. He came in saying, the stupid way people do, “How are you?”

“I’m dead,” I said. I was, too. No sleep for two nights; dead tired. No Opie in the house. Dead. Dead inside.

He sat down and had sense enough to say nothing. When I could think of something to say, it was, “Hank, I’m not going to say anything about Opie that sounds lousy. But I have to check, I have to be sure. Just what did she tell you?”