Is That What People Do? (39 page)

“No, not just now,” Lanigan said. (Five paintings, green carpet.)

“Just as you please,” the doctor said. “I think that our time is just about up. But if you’d care to lie down in the anteroom—”

“No, thanks, I’ll go home,” Lanigan said.

He stood up, walked across the green carpet to the door, looked back at the five paintings and at the doctor, who smiled at him encouragingly. Then Lanigan went through the door and into the anteroom, through the anteroom to the outer door and through that and down the corridor to the stairs and down the stairs to the street.

He walked and looked at the trees, on which green leaves moved faintly and predictably in a faint breeze. There was traffic, which moved soberly down one side of the street and up the other. The sky was an unchanging blue, and had obviously been so for quite some time.

Dream? He pinched himself. A dream pinch? He did not awaken. He shouted. An imaginary shout? He did not awaken.

He was in the street of the world of his nightmare.

The street at first seemed like any normal city street. There were paving stones, cars, people, buildings, a sky overhead, a sun in the sky. All perfectly normal. Except that
nothing was happening.

The pavement never once yielded beneath his feet. Over there was the First National City Bank; it had been here yesterday, which was bad enough; but worse it would be there without fail tomorrow, and the day after that, and the year after that. The First National City Bank (Founded 1892) was grotesquely devoid of possibilities. It would never become a tomb, an airplane, the bones of a prehistoric monster. Sullenly it would remain a building of concrete and steel, madly persisting in its fixity until men with tools came and tediously tore it down.

Lanigan walked through this petrified world, under a blue sky that oozed a sly white around the edges, teasingly promising something that was never delivered. Traffic moved implacably to the right, people crossed at crossings, clocks were within minutes of agreement.

Somewhere beyond the town lay countryside; but Lanigan knew that the grass did not grow under one’s feet; it simply lay still, growing no doubt, but imperceptibly, unusable to the senses. And the mountains were still tall and black, but they were giants stopped in mid-stride. They would never march against a golden (or purple or green) sky.

The essence of life, Dr. Sampson had once said, is change. The essence of death is immobility. Even a corpse has a vestige of life about it as long as its flesh rots, as long as maggots still feast on its blind eyes and blowflies suck the juice from the burst intestines.

Lanigan looked around at the corpse of the world and perceived that it was dead.

He screamed. He screamed while people gathered around and looked at him (but didn’t do anything or become anything), and then a policeman came as he was supposed to (but the sun didn’t change shape once), and then an ambulance came down the invariant street (but without trumpets, minus strumpets, on four wheels instead of a pleasing three or twenty-five) and the ambulance men brought him to a building which was exactly where they expected to find it, and there was a great deal of talk by people who stood untransformed, asking questions in a room with relentlessly white walls.

And there was evening and there was morning, and it was the first day.

UNCOLLECTED SHECKLEY

FIVE MINUTES EARLY

Suddenly, John Greer found that he was at the entrance to heaven. Before him stretched the white and azure cloudlands of the hereafter, and in the far distance he could see a fabulous city gleaming gold under an eternal sun. Standing in front of him was the tall, benign presence of the Recording Angel. Strangely, Greer felt no sense of shock. He had always believed that heaven was for everyone, not just the members of one religion or sect. Despite this, he had been tortured all his life by doubts. Now he could only smile at his lack of faith in the divine scheme.

“Welcome to heaven,” the Recording Angel said, and opened a great brassbound ledger. Squinting through thick bifocals, the angel ran his finger down the dense rows of names. He found Greer’s entry and hesitated, his wingtips fluttering momentarily in agitation.

“Is something wrong?” Greer asked.

“I’m afraid so,” the Recording Angel said. “It seems that the Angel of Death came for you before your appointed time. He
has
been badly overworked of late, but it’s still inexcusable. Luckily, it’s quite a minor error.”

“Taking me away before my time?” Greer said. “I don’t consider that minor.”

“But you see, it’s only a matter of five minutes. Nothing to concern yourself over. Shall we just overlook the discrepancy and send you on to the Eternal City?”

The Recording Angel was right, no doubt. What difference could five more minutes on Earth make to him? Yet Greer felt they might be important, even though he couldn’t say why.

“I’d like those five minutes,” Greer said.

The Recording Angel looked at him with compassion. “You have the right, of course. But I would advise against it. Do you remember how you died?”

Greer thought, then shook his head. “How?” he asked.

“I am not allowed to say. But death is never pleasant. You’re here now. Why not stay with us?”

That was only reasonable. But Greer was nagged by a sense of something unfinished. “If it’s allowed,” he said, “I really would like to have those last minutes.”

“Go, then,” said the angel, “and I will wait for you here.”

And suddenly Greer was back on Earth. He was in a cylindrical metal room lit by dim, flickering lights. The air was stale and smelled of steam and machine oil. The steel walls were heaving and creaking, and water was pouring through the seams.

Then Greer remembered where he was. He was a gunnery officer aboard the U.S. submarine
Invictus.
There had been a sonar failure; they had just rammed an underwater cliff that should have been a mile away, and now were dropping helplessly through the black water. Already the
Invictus
was far below her maximum depth. It could only be a matter of minutes before the rapidly mounting pressure collapsed the ship’s hull. Greer knew it would happen in exactly five minutes.

There was no panic on the ship. The seamen braced themselves against the bulging walls, waiting, frightened, but in tight control of themselves. The technicians stayed at their posts, steadily reading the instruments that told them they had no chance at all. Greer knew that the Recording Angel had wanted to spare him this, the bitter end of life, the brief sharp agony of death in the icy dark.

And yet Greer was glad to be here, though he didn’t expect the Recording Angel to understand. How could a creature of heaven know the feelings of a man of Earth? After all, most men died in fear and ignorance, expecting at worst the tortures of hell, at best the nothingness of oblivion. Greer knew what lay ahead, knew that the Recording Angel awaited him at the entrance to heaven. Therefore he was able to spend his final minutes making a proper and dignified exit from the Earth. As the submarine’s walls collapsed, he was remembering a sunset over Key West, a quick dramatic summer storm on the Chesapeake, the slow circle of a hawk soaring above the Everglades. Although heaven lay ahead, now only seconds away, Greer was thinking of the beauties of the Earth, remembering as many of them as he could, like a man packing provisions for a long journey into a strange land.

MISS MOUSE AND THE FOURTH DIMENSION

I first met Charles Foster at the Claerston Award dinner at Leadbeater’s Hall in the Strand. It was my second night in London. I had come to England with the hope of signing some new authors for my list. I am Max Seidel, publisher of Manjusri Books. We are a small esoteric publishing company operating out of Linwood, New Jersey—just me and Miss Thompson, my assistant. My books sell well to the small but faithful portion of the population interested in spiritualism, out-of-body experiences, Atlantis, flying saucers, and New Age technology. Charles Foster was one of the men I had come to meet.

Pam Devore, our British sales representative, pointed Foster out to me. I saw a tall, good-looking man in his middle thirties, with a great mane of reddish blond hair, talking animatedly with two dowager types. Sitting beside him, listening intently, was a small woman in her late twenties with neat, plain features and fine chestnut hair.

“Is that his wife?” I asked.

Pam laughed. “Goodness, no! Charles is too fond of women to actually marry one. That’s Miss Mouse.”

“Is Mouse an English name?”

“It’s just Charles’s nickname for her. Actually, she’s not very mouselike at all. Marmoset might be more like it, or even wolverine. She’s Mimi Royce, a society photographer. She’s quite well off—the Royce textile mills in Lancashire, you know—and she adores Charles, poor thing.”

“He does seem to be an attractive man,” I said.

“I suppose so,” Pam said, “if you like the type.” She glanced at me to see how I was taking that, then laughed when she saw my expression.

“Yes, I
am
rather prejudiced,” she confessed. “Charles used to be rather interested in me until he found his own true love.”

“Who was—?”

“Himself, of course. Come, let me introduce you.”

Foster knew about Manjusri Books and was interested in publishing with us. He thought we might be a good showcase for his talents, especially since Paracelsus Press had done so poorly with his last, Journey Through the Eye of the Tiger. There was something open and boyish about Foster. He spoke in a high, clear English voice that conjured up in me a vision of punting on the Thames on a misty autumn day.

Charles was the sort of esoteric writer who goes out and has adventures and then writes them up in a portentous style. His search was for—well, what shall I call it? The Beyond? The Occult? The Interface? After twenty years in this business I still don’t know how to describe, in one simple phrase, the sort of book I publish. Charles Foster’s last book had dealt with three months he had spent with a Baluchistani Dervish in the desert of Kush under incredibly austere conditions. What had he gotten out of it? A direct though fleeting knowledge of the indivisible oneness of things, a sense of the mystery and the grandeur of existence… in short, the usual thing. And he had gotten a book out of it; and that, too, is the usual thing.

We set up a lunch for the next day. I rented a car and drove to Charles’s house in Oxfordshire. It was a beautiful old thatch-roofed building set in the middle of five acres of rolling countryside. It was called Sepoy Cottage, despite the fact that it had five bedrooms and three parlors. It didn’t actually belong to Charles, as he told me immediately. It belonged to Mimi Royce.

“But she lets me use it whenever I like,” he said. “Mouse is such a dear.” He smiled like a well-bred child talking about his favorite aunt. “She’s so interested in one’s little adventures, one’s trips along the interface between reality and the ineffable… Insists on typing up my manuscripts just for the pleasure it gives her to read them first.”

“That
is
lucky,” I said, “typing rates being what they are these days.”

Just then Mimi came in with tea. Foster regarded her with bland indifference. Either he was unaware of her obvious adoration of him, or he chose not to acknowledge it. Mimi, for her part, did not seem to mind. I assumed that I was seeing a display of the British National Style in affairs of the heart subdued, muffled, unobtrusive. She went away after serving us, and Charles and I talked auras and ley-lines for a while, then got down to the topic of real interest to us both—his next book.

“It’s going to be a bit unusual,” he told me, leaning back and templing his fingers.

“Another spiritual adventure?” I asked. “What will it be about?”

“Guess!” he said.

“Let’s see. Are you by any chance going to Machu Picchu to check out the recent reports of spaceship landings?”

He shook his head. “Elton Travis is already covering it for Mystic Revelations Press. No, my next adventure will take place right here in Sepoy Cottage.”

“Have you discovered a ghost or poltergeist here?”

“Nothing so mundane.”

“Then I really have no idea,” I told him.

“What I propose,” Foster said, “is to create an opening into the unknown right here in Sepoy Cottage, and to journey through it into the unimaginable. And then, of course, to write up what I’ve found there.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Are you familiar with Von Helmholz’s work?”

“Was he the one who read tarot cards for Frederick the Great?”

“No, that was Manfred Von Helmholz. I am referring to Wilhelm, a famous mathematician and scientist in the nineteenth century. He maintained that it was theoretically possible to
see
directly into the fourth dimension.”

I turned the concept over in my mind. It didn’t do much for me.

“This ‘fourth dimension’ to which he refers,” Foster went on, “is synonymous with the spiritual or ethereal realm of the mystics. The name of the place changes with the times, but the region itself is unchanging.”

I nodded. Despite myself, I am a believer. That’s what brought me into this line of work. But I also know that illusion and self-deception are the rule in these matters rather than the exception.

“But this spirit realm, or fourth dimension,” Foster went on, “is also our everyday reality. Spirits surround us. They move through that strange realm which Von Helmholz called the fourth dimension. Normally they can’t be seen.”

It sounded to me as if Foster was extemporizing the first chapter of his book. Still, I didn’t interrupt. “Our eyes are blinded by everyday reality. But there are techniques by means of which we can train ourselves to see what
else
is there. Do you know about Hinton’s cubes? Hinton is mentioned by Martin Gardner in Mathematical Carnival. Charles Howard Hinton was an eccentric American mathematician who, around 1910, came up with a scheme for learning how to visualize a tesseract, also called a hypercube or four
-
dimensional square. His technique involved colored cubes that fit together to form a single master cube. Hinton felt that one could learn to see the separate colored cubes in the mind and then, mentally, to manipulate and rotate them, fold them into and out of the greater cube shape, and to do this faster and faster until at last a gestalt forms and the hypercube springs forth miraculously in your mind.”