Dimension of Miracles (20 page)

‘And what is that?’

‘You Wouldn’t want to know,’ the Prize warned him.

‘I do want to know.’

‘I know that you
do
want to know; but after you hear, you will wish that you
didn’t
know.’

‘Out with it,’ Carmody said. ‘What is your staple diet?’

‘All right, Mr Nosey,’ the Prize said. ‘But remember, you insisted upon knowing. My staple diet is myself.’

‘Is what?’

‘Myself. I said you Wouldn’t like it.’

‘Your diet is yourself? You mean that you feast off your own body?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Damn it all,’ Carmody said, ‘aside from being repulsive, that’s impossible. You can’t live off yourself!’

‘I can and I do,’ the Prize said. ‘And I’m quite proud of the fact. Morally, it is an outstanding example of personal freedom.’

‘But it just is’t possible,’ Carmody said. ‘It violates the law of conservation of energy, or mass, or something like that. It sure as hell violates
some
natural law.’

‘That’s true, but only in a specialized sense,’ the Prize said. ‘When you come to examine the matter more closely, you can, I think, see that the impossibility is more apparent than real.’

‘What in hell does
that
mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ the Prize confessed. ‘It’s the answer in all our textbooks. Nobody ever questioned it before.’

‘I want to get this straight,’ Carmody said. ‘Do you mean that you actually and literally
eat
portions of your own flesh?’

‘Yes,’ the Prize said. ‘That’s what I mean. Though you shouldn’t confine it solely to my flesh. My liver is a tasty morsel, especially when chopped up with a hard-boiled egg and a little chicken fat. And my short ribs have served me well for a quick, casual sort of dinner; whereas my hams ought to be mild-cured for several weeks before –’

‘Enough,’ Carmody said.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Prize said.

‘But just tell me this: how can your body provide enough food for your body (this sounds ridiculous) throughout a lifetime?’

‘Well,’ the Prize said thoughtfully, ‘for one thing, I’m not a particularly heavy eater.’

‘Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear,’ Carmody said. ‘I mean, how can you provide bulk for your body if you are simultaneously
using
that bulk to feed your body with?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand that,’ the Prize said.

‘Let me try again. I mean this: if you consume your flesh –’

‘And in fact I do,’ the Prize put in.

‘If you consume your flesh, and utilize the product of that consumption for the nutrition of that same flesh … Just a minute. If you weighed fifty pounds –’

‘In point of fact, on my home planet I weigh precisely fifty pounds.’

‘Excellent! Well, then. If you weigh fifty pounds, and, over the course of, let us say a year, consume forty pounds of yourself in order to support yourself, then what are you left with?’

‘Ten pounds?’ the Prize asked.

‘Goddamn it, can’t you see what I’m driving at? You simply cannot nourish yourself
on
yourself for any length of time.’

‘Why can’t I?’ the Prize asked.

‘The Law of Diminishing Returns,’ Carmody said, feeling lightheaded. ‘Eventually there will be no more of you left for you to feed upon, and you will die.’

‘I am quite aware of that,’ the Prize said. ‘But death is an inexorable fact, as true and unavoidable for the self-eaters as for the other-eaters. Everything and everybody dies, Carmody, no matter who or what it feeds upon.’

‘You’re putting me on!’ Carmody howled. ‘If you really did feed like that, you’d be dead in a week.’

‘There are insects whose lifespan is but a single day,’ the Prize said. ‘Actually, we Prizes do rather well, longevity-wise. Remember, the more we consume, the less of us there is to be nourished, and the longer the remaining food lasts. And time is a great factor in autopredation. Most Prizes consume their future while in their infancy, thus leaving the actual corpus untouched until they have come into their maturity.’

‘How do they consume their future?’ Carmody asked.

‘I can’t explain how,’ the Prize said. ‘We simply do it, that’s all. I, for example, gobbled up my substance for the ages eighty through ninety-two – senile years, by the way, which I wouldn’t have enjoyed anyway. Now, by rationing my intake of myself, I think I can make it to my late seventies.’

‘You’re giving me a headache,’ Carmody said. ‘And you’re also making me somewhat nauseous.’

‘Indeed?’ said the Prize indignantly. ‘You’ve got a hell of a nerve to feel nauseous! You bloody butcher, how many animal sections have you consumed in your lifetime? How many defenceless apples have you gobbled, how many heads of lettuce have you callously ripped from their beds? I have eaten an occasional
orithi,
to be sure; but at Judgement Day you will have to face the herds you have devoured. They will stand before you, Carmody, hundreds of brown-eyed cows, thousands of defenceless hens, endless rows of gentle little lambs; to say nothing of the forests of raped fruit trees and the acres of savaged gardens. I will pay for the
orithi
I have eaten; but how will you ever atone for the shrieking mounds of animal and vegetable life that you have feasted upon? How, Carmody, how?’

‘Shut up,’ Carmody said.

‘Oh, very well,’ the Prize said sulkily.

‘I eat because I must. It’s part of my nature. That’s all there is to it.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I damned well do say so! Now will you shut up and let me concentrate?’

‘I won’t say another word,’ the Prize said, ‘except to ask you what you are trying to concentrate on.’

‘This place looks like my home town,’ Carmody explained. ‘I’m trying to decide if it really is or not.’

‘Surely that can’t be so difficult,’ the Prize said. ‘I mean to say, one knows one’s own home town, doesn’t one?’

‘No. I never looked at it closely while I lived here, and I didn’t think about it much after I left.’

‘If you can’t figure out what is your home and what is not,’ the Prize said, ‘then no one can. I hope you realize that.’

‘I realize it,’ Carmody said. He began to walk slowly down Maplewood Avenue. He had the sudden terrible feeling that any decision he made would be wrong.

CHAPTER 27

Carmody looked as he walked, and observed as he looked. It seemed like the place he thought it should seem like. The Maplewood Theatre was on his right; today’s feature was
The Saga of Elephantine,
an Italian-French adventure film directed by Jacques Marat, the brilliant young director who had given the world the deeply moving
Song of My Wounds
and the swiftly paced comedy
Paris Times Fourteen.
On the stage, for a limited engagement only, was the new vocal group, Iakonnen and the Fungi.

‘Sounds like a fun film,’ Carmody remarked.

‘Not my sort of thing,’ the Prize said.

Carmody stopped at Marvin’s Haberdashery and looked in the window. He saw loafers and saddle shoes, hound’s-tooth check jackets, wide, boldly patterned neckties, white shirts with spread collars. Next to it, at the stationery store, he glanced at the current
Colliers,
leafed through
Liberty,
noticed
Munsey’s, Black Cat,
and
The Spy.
The morning edition of
The Sun
had just come out.

‘Well?’ the Prize asked. ‘Is this the place?’

‘I’m still checking,’ Carmody said. ‘But it looks pretty favourable so far.’

He crossed the street and looked into Edgar’s Luncheonette. It hadn’t changed. There was a pretty girl sitting at the counter, sipping a soda. Carmody recognized her at once.

‘Lana Turner! Hey, how are you, Lana?’

‘I’m fine, Tom,’ Lana said. ‘Long time no see.’

‘I used to date her in high school,’ he explained to the Prize as they walked on. ‘It’s funny how it all comes back to you.’

‘I suppose so,’ the Prize said doubtfully.

At the next corner, the intersection of Maplewood Avenue and South Mountain Road, there was a policeman. He was directing traffic, but he took time to grin at Carmody.

‘That’s Burt Lancaster,’ Carmody said. ‘He was all-state fullback on the best team Columbia High School ever had. And look, over there! That man going into the hardware store, the one who waved at me! That’s Clifton Webb, our high-school principal. And down the block, do you see that blonde woman? That’s Jean Harlow. She used to be the waitress at the Maplewood Restaurant.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Everybody said she was
fast.’

‘You seem to know a lot of people,’ the Prize said.

‘Well, of course I do! I was raised here! Miss Harlow is going into Pierre’s Beauty Parlour.’

‘Do you know Pierre, also?’

‘Sure. He’s a hairdresser now, but during the war he was in the French Resistance. What was his name again? Jean-Pierre Aumont, that’s it! He married one of our local girls, Carole Lombard.’

‘Interesting,’ the Prize said in a bored voice.

‘Well, it’s interesting for me. Here comes a man I know … Good day, Mr Mayor.’

‘Good day, Tom,’ the man said, and tipped his hat and walked on.

‘That’s Fredric March, our mayor,’ Carmody said. ‘He’s a tremendous person! I can still remember the debate between him and our local radical, Paul Muni. Boy, you never heard anything like it!’

‘Hmm,’ said the Prize. ‘There is something strange about all this, Carmody. Something uncanny, something not right. Don’t you feel it?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Carmody said. ‘I’m telling you, I grew up with these people, I know them better than I know myself. Hey, there’s Paulette Goddard over there. She’s the assistant librarian. Hi, Paulette!’

‘Hi, Tom,’ the woman said.

‘I don’t like this,’ the Prize said.

‘I never knew her very well,’ Carmody said. ‘She used to go with a boy from Millburn named Humphrey Bogart. He always wore bow ties, can you imagine that? He had a fight once with Lon Chaney, the school janitor. Licked him, too. I remember that because I was dating June Havoc at the time, and her best friend was Myrna Loy, and Myrna knew Bogart, and –’

‘Carmody!’ the Prize said urgently. ‘Watch yourself! Have you ever heard of pseudo-acclimatization?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Carmody said. ‘I tell you, I know these people! grew up here, and it was a damned good place to grow up in! People weren’t just blobs like they are now; people really stood for something. People were
individuals
then, not crowds!’

‘Are you quite sure of this? Your predator –’

‘Rats, I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Carmody said. ‘Look! There’s David Niven! His parents are English.’

‘These people are coming towards you,’ the Prize said.

‘Well, sure they are,’ Carmody said. ‘They haven’t seen me for a long time.’

He stood on the corner and his friends came down the pavement and the street, out of stores and shops. There were literally hundreds of them, all smiling, all old friends. He spotted Alan Ladd, Dorothy Lamour and Larry Buster Crabbe. And over there he saw Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, Freddy Bartholomew, John Wayne, Frances Farmer –

‘There’s something wrong with this,’ the Prize said.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Carmody insisted. His friends were all present, they were moving closer to him, holding out their hands, and he was happier than he had ever been since leaving his home. He was amazed that he could have forgotten how it had been. But he remembered now.

‘Carmody!’ the Prize shouted.

‘What is it?’

‘Is there always this music in your world?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about the music,’ the Prize said. ‘Don’t you hear it?’

Carmody noticed it for the first time. A symphony orchestra was playing, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

‘How long has that been going on?’

‘Ever since we got here,’ the Prize told him. ‘When you started down the street there was a soft thunder of drums. Then, when you passed the theatre, a lively air was played on a trumpet. This changed, when you looked into the luncheonette, to a rather saccharine melody played by several hundred violins. Then –’

‘That was background music,’ Carmody said dully. ‘This whole damned thing was scored, and I didn’t even notice it.’

Franchot Tone reached out and touched his sleeve. Gary Cooper dropped a big hand on his shoulder. Laird Cregar gave him an affectionate bear hug. Shirley Temple seized his right foot. The others pressed closer, all still smiling.

‘Seethwright!’ Carmody shouted. ‘For God’s sake, Seethwright!’

After that, things happened a little too fast for his comprehension.

PART FIVE

The Return to Earth