Читать книгу As You Were - Henry Kuttner - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Something was keeping Peter Owen awake. Either the coastal thunderstorm outside his bedroom window was distracting him, or his choice of reading material had been unwise. The book which Owen, propped up in bed, was reading, bore the revolting title of New Uncoiled Gastropods From the Middle Devonian, and had promised to be a relaxing change from last night’s rather thrilling account of the Simpler Acyclic and Monocyclic Terpenes.

Peter Owen sighed and turned a page. Then he uncoiled nervously, like a gastropod, as a knock sounded on the door.

He called, “Come in,” and looked up with some anxiety, relieved to see the short, plump, white-haired old gentleman who came stumping into the bedroom in response to his invitation.

“To myself, I say beer,” announced the old gentleman, holding up a foaming glass. “Then I think, for a young man at bedtime—yes, Peter, you have guessed it. Beer.”

With an air of triumph Dr. Sigmund Krafft allowed a smile to crease the imperturbable crumble of wrinkles he called a face. Owen, recalled from the life of the gastropod to the problems of his own somewhat more turbulent existence, took the beer with a vague blink. Then he remembered that Dr. Krafft was a guest in this house, though not his own. He prepared to get up.

“Why didn’t you call me, Doctor?” he asked. “I’d have got you some beer. That’s what I’m here for, after the servants leave for the night. Not that I mind. I mean—” He floundered slightly.

Krafft came to his rescue. “It was no trouble, Peter. I was thinking about next Tuesday. Next Tuesday night at this time I shall be in my own nice little study in Connecticut, all quiet and happy, and then I shall have a glass of beer. So I thought, Sigmund—yes, you have guessed it—I thought I would have a glass of beer now and imagine it was next Tuesday.”

A crash, a thud and a loud outcry sounded from the floor below. The two men exchanged significant glances. Dr. Krafft shrugged a little. The outcry rose even louder and angry commands could be heard, muffled by the walls between and the noises of the storm outside. “Break, blast you!” the voice downstairs shouted. “Break!” Thuds followed rapidly.

“The Shostakovich records,” Dr. Krafft said. “Unbreakable, you know. Perhaps a hacksaw—still, no. Better to keep away until he feels happier. I shall think about next Tuesday and forget all that trouble with your uncle, my boy. I am sorry we disagreed, but how could I say a space-time continuum is not cyclical when I know it is?”

“Break! Break!” cried the voice from below, and a renewed thud made the walls shiver slightly. The full weight of the world-famous C. Edmund Stumm, author, critic and playwright, had apparently come down flat-footedly upon the offending records. “Break!” his voice shouted Tennysonianly, but no obedient crackle of vinylite responded and Owen curled up a little with dread. C. Edmund Stumm, thwarted, was not a subject to think about unmoved.

“That young lady, your friend—she is a brave girl,” Dr. Krafft said soberly.

Owen shuddered. Claire Bishop, fair and fascinating, was not so much brave as foolhardy. Also, she had a temper almost the equal of C. Edmund Stumm’s. As a direct consequence, the indestructibility of vinylite was being tried to its last measure of resistance in the music room downstairs. Claire this afternoon, as a climax to a thoroughly disastrous interview with Uncle Edmund, had rashly expressed a preference for Shostakovich over Prokofieff. She thereby canceled completely all of Owen’s desperate efforts of the past month to bring about an amicable meeting between the rising young screen actress whom he adored, and the uncle whose famous Broadway play, Lady Pantagruel, might well have been written with Claire’s special talents in mind.

Due to the curious convolutions of Hollywood reasoning, the role of Lady Pantagruel was what Claire badly needed just now. Her career was in serious peril. But Owen’s painstaking arrangements went for naught after the fireworks started. Uncle Edmund had so nearly—so nearly!—signed the contract of sale, Owen remembered in anguish. Still, how could he blame Claire? He stared at the floor and wished that he were dead.

“—lost my dear Maxl,” Dr. Krafft was murmuring distractedly, peering about the room. “Now if you happened to notice where I might have put Maxl—”

“I beg your pardon, Doctor?” Owen said, recalling himself.

“I have lost poor Maxl,” Krafft repeated, sighing deeply. “Ah well, who is perfect? The trouble with time-experimenting is that you cannot always remember when you did something. To find Maxl I need quiet and concentration. But without Maxl, how can I concentrate?” He smiled. “A paradox! For me, a scientist, to be helpless without a little stone frog—you have guessed it, Peter. Absurd! Ah, well!”

He turned toward the door, shaking his white head. “Good night, Peter. If you happen to see Maxl, you will tell me?”

“Right away,” Owen promised. “Good night, Doctor. Thanks for the beer.”

“Of course it is only a habit and a fetich, but—” The door closed on his mild murmuring. In the same instant a flash of violet light and an appalling crash from outside brought Owen upright with a start. Automatically, somehow, he attributed the noise to his uncle’s ultimate success in smashing the records, perhaps with an atomic bomb. But vision instantly corrected that assumption.

Outside, near the edge of the cliff that jutted into the Pacific, a lone Monterey cypress stood outlined in a blaze of fire. As the lightning faded a new flash stood quivering in the sky, showing the cypress toppling headlong over the edge of the cliff.

Owen had an odd conviction that the cypress must somehow have offended his uncle. He sighed. Storms were no rarity at this season in the slightly famous little sea-coast resort of Las Ondas. Nor were storms rare in Owen’s life, which explains why he had schooled himself in the past six months to imitate the passivity of a lightning-rod.

He rather wished he could uncoil, like a gastropod, from what had become a cramping position in life, ever since, at his uncle’s insistence, he had quit his managerial job with a Hollywood commercial-film company and become Mr. Stumm’s private secretary. The glibness of his uncle’s promises had only stressed the fact that C. Edmund Stumm, himself, was one of the worst polecats in the state of California, which covers considerable territory.

Absently Owen fumbled for his beer. His eyes had gone back to the small print of his book, which dealt with what now seemed a lovely, unemotional, mild-tempered world in which the growth and reproduction of the slimy salamander plethodon glutinosus followed a calm, predictable course.

Have you ever picked up a glass of water, thinking it was milk or beer? Do you know that slow, incredulous moment of total disorientation as the surprise of it dawns upon your stunned taste-buds?

Owen took a long, satisfying drink of what he had every reason to expect was beer, chilled to exactly the right temperature by a special compartment in the refrigerator.

It was not beer.

But it was the most delicious, the most satisfying, the most incredible draught Owen had ever tasted in his life. Cool, shadowy, hollow, insubstantial as a breeze blowing from nowhere, the drink poured down Peter Owen’s throat.

Shocked into belated surprise, he lowered the beer-glass, staring. But it wasn’t a beer-glass.

He was holding a clock!

He had never seen the clock before in his life. Sitting bolt upright against his pillows, conscious of the wild drumming of rain on glass, and muffled thunder far off over the sea, he swallowed convulsively two or three times. He could still taste that incredible draught. Or could he?

His throat seemed to tingle slightly, and he had an extraordinary sense of well-being, amounting almost to giddiness. This passed instantly, to be lost in baffled disbelief.

He glanced from the clock to the bedside table. There sat his glass, white-collared above the amber beer, its sides frosted with trickling condensation. Perfectly convinced that he was going mad, Peter Owen stared at the blue enamel clock, turning it over in his hands, looking for some conceivable explanation. His taste-buds still tingled.

Or did they? He reached hastily for the beer and took a swig. There was no comparison. This was good beer, but only beer—not nectar. Quite obviously, you can’t take a drink out of a clock. From a skull, perhaps, if you have morbid tastes, or champagne from a slipper—but a clock? What could one drink out of a clock if a clock could be drunk out of?

“Time?” Owen, wondered madly. “Time isn’t a liquid. You can’t drink time. I’m all keyed up. That’s what it is. Imagination.” He thought this over tentatively. “I was expecting to taste beer, so I did taste it—except that it didn’t taste like beer. Well, that’s natural. It wasn’t beer. It wasn’t anything. Just—a deep breath?” He puzzled over that, settling back slowly on his pillow. Then he sat up again abruptly, staring at the clock, as he realized suddenly that he had never seen it before.

He had a horrid suspicion that his uncle might have decided to give him an unexpected present. Timeo Danaos, he thought warily. Uncle Edmund never gave away anything. It might to the outward eye have seemed a gracious gesture to invite Dr. Krafft to Las Ondas for an extended seaside vacation, but the motives behind that were anything but gracious. Uncle Edmund was working on a sequel to Lady Pantagruel at the moment, and cunningly picking Dr. Krafft’s brains in the process. Lady Pantagruel’s popularity was in great measure due to the good Doctor’s contributions at the time of its writing two years ago. It dealt with time-travel, somewhat in the manner of Berkeley Square, and many of the best ideas in it had been Dr. Krafft’s, though one would look in vain for acknowledgements on the playbill.

As for the clock Owen still held in his shrinking hand, if it were a gift from Uncle Edmund it was probably a well-disguised atom bomb. He examined it warily. Some kind of booby-trap, without a doubt. Had the trap sprung? Certainly something had happened, though surely he hadn’t actually drunk a liquid draught out of the clock. A sort of mass hallucination of the senses might momentarily have deceived him, but not for long. The thing was impossible....

It was a small clock, not much larger than an old-fashioned turnip watch—rather like an oppressed lemon, Owen thought with some natural confusion—and it had a loud, penetrating tick. It had the usual two hands, and apparently it wasn’t an alarm clock. Also, it was thirteen minutes fast.

Owen blinked at his own clock on the bureau, an electric model with the alarm set for seven. Thoughtfully he reset the blue enamel clock, turning back the black minute-hand to ten-forty in agreement with the electric dial. Gingerly he put the loud-ticking object on the bedside table, gazed at it suspiciously, and reached for his beer....

There was no beer.

Owen gave a faint cry of dismay and surged sidewise, staring down at the floor. He remembered very distinctly having set the glass on the table a few seconds ago. Had it fallen off? There was no trace anywhere of beer or glass. With a fearful suspicion that his mind had finally snapped under the strain of living with his uncle, Owen flung his torso headfirst out of the bed and dangled upside-down (like Mr. Quilp, he thought with a shudder), praying that the glass had rolled under the bed.

It hadn’t.

“Delusions of persecution,” he said to himself, upside-down, dizzily thinking how odd the words looked. “Now I’m suspecting Uncle Edmund of stealing my beer. Oh, this is terrible. I can never marry Claire now. I couldn’t pass on the stigma of insanity to our children.” The blood rushed to his head as he hung like a bat, peering under the bed and dimly hoping this might be a therapeutic measure to restore his sanity.

Across the room and upside-down he saw the lower part of the door open, and a pair of gnarled feet in carpet slippers entered.

“Something is lost?” Dr. Krafft inquired mildly.

“Beer,” Owen said to the feet. “I’m looking for a glass of beer.”

“But in the wrong place,” Dr. Krafft suggested. “To myself, just now I say beer. Then I think, for a young man at bedtime—yes, Peter, you have guessed it. Beer.”

Owen wrenched himself back to a more normal position and sat up in bed staring at Dr. Krafft with a disorienting feeling that he had lived through this moment before. The old gentleman was holding out a foaming glass.

“I shall drink one too,” Dr. Krafft said placidly. “And I shall imagine it to be next Tuesday, when I am back home. Only—Peter, I am afraid I have lost my dear Maxl.”

“Again?”

Dr. Krafft peered at him mildly. “Well, I am absent-minded, Peter. Of course it is absurd to have such a fetich-habit. But I cannot concentrate on my discontinuum orientation unless I look at Maxl, you see. And the tesseract experiments must stop until I find him. So much of the work depends on absolute concentration before plenum-consciousness can be obliterated. Long ago I used an opal. But I got used to little Maxl, and now I cannot work without him. If you see him, Peter, please let me know at once.” Here he shook his white head gravely. “Ah well,” he said. “Good night, Peter.”

“G-good night,” Owen said, and watched Dr. Krafft depart, leaving Owen to consider the possibility that he wasn’t the only lunatic around here.

A flash of violet light and an appalling crash outside made him jerk around toward the window. Outlined in lightning, the lone Monterey cypress stood on the edge of the bluff. Apparently it had pulled itself together, crawled back up the cliff like a sprout from Dunsinane, and re-rooted itself just in time to disprove the truism that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. A second flash showed the dogged but doomed cypress again taking a nose-dive back over the brink.

“No, no,” Owen said in a low, mild voice of disapproval. Then he laughed quietly, but in what sounded to him like a slightly unhinged tone. “You’re a glass of beer,” he told the glass of beer. “And I’m a white rabbit with a blue enamel clock in my waistcoat pocket—no, what am I saying? Get a grip on yourself, Peter. You’re asleep, that’s all. Hang onto that thought. You can prove it. Put the glass down and watch it vanish.”