Edgar Pangborn - A Mirror for Observers

I glanced back in time to see Billy come back out, after the smash of a bottle splintering on wood. He ambled around a corner without haste. On impulse I returned. I pounded on the door until I heard dreary cursing and a shuffle of slippers. I said: “Fire Department survey.”

“Yah?” She blocked the doorway with beefy arms. She was blinking, red-eyed, vague, not really old — fifties perhaps — and not badly dressed. Hostility in her face dissolved in a silly simper, and her breath was fearsome. Over her shoulder I saw a dingy front room filled with dressmaker’s gear. She was certainly human — after all, a Salvayan practically can’t get drunk. I think that sober she might have been quite different, perhaps grimly respectable and hard-working — the dressmaking equipment looked professional. The drink would be an addiction, an escape from smothering hardship and frustrations, and the years of it had beaten her down like a disease, leaving her frightened, peevish, isolated, old: so much was written on her face in coarse print. The bottle (empty) had crashed against the doorframe, scattering shards everywhere; I guessed that Billy would have been safely clear of it before she let it go. “Had lil accident,” she chuckled. “It’s the hot weather, I ain’t well exactly.” She struggled with a wandering strand of gray-brown hair. “And what have I the honor do f’you, mister?”

“Routine survey, ma’am. How many live here?”

She lurched away from the door. “Me and the boy is all.”

“Oh — just you and your son, ma’am?”

“’Dopted — that be any damn business yours? I pay taxes, no offense of course, ’m sure.”

“Just routine. May I look over the wiring?”

She waved and patted her lips. “Anybody stopping you?”

I left her making futile passes at the broken glass, and took a swift trip through the house, unopposed. There were only two rooms upstairs, the neat one obviously Billy’s; sorry and rather ashamed, I did not linger in the other bedroom. Billy’s room told me nothing, unless the very absence of boy’s trinkets meant something. A military-looking cot, a pile of schoolbooks noticeably unmarked, though Feuermann and Angelo had said he was supposed to be a good student. If there was any Martian scent it was so faint I could not separate it from my own; but the absence of it would not be negative proof, for Namir had stolen enough destroyer to take care of two users for a long time. At any rate Billy could not be Namir himself, since even the Abdicator’s skill in disguise could not make him convincingly square-bodied and a foot shorter.

The woman was painfully apologizing as I left. Hot weather, she said. She’d offer me a lil drink only there wasn’t a thing in the house, though ordinarily she liked to keep some on hand for her digestion, so’s the food wouldn’t all the time rift up on her. We parted friends.

If I am right about Billy Kell, I suppose he talked and charmed his way into some makeshift unofficial relation with this woman, playing on her loneliness and thwarted maternity, to give himself a temporary name and a screen of human association. In calling him “adopted” her manner had displayed truculent fear of authority. Legal adoption, I believe, is hedged about with formalities that neither he nor she could have satisfied. When her usefulness to him is ended, no doubt Billy Kell will vanish — without conscience or pity or any debt of loyalty if he is the son of Namir.

Back at the lodging house, I wanted to make good on my promise to talk with Angelo. More reason than ever now, after seeing the human background of Billy Kell. But there were difficulties in any direct approach.

Angelo was fond of me, I felt sure. He listened if I spoke. The interludes in the woods were a delight for him: he wanted to say so, and managed to do it, with an adult’s command of words and a boy’s shyness. I had bought books for him, and drawn others from the library. He was very handsome with his thanks for that too. (One was Huck Finn, which he had disgracefully never read.) Somehow we got into no really satisfying discussion of those books. He wallowed in Mark Twain and Melville; I knew he was startled by Dostoevski, and amused by the thin wind of fallacy that blew through the unsanitary beard of Marx. But there were reservations: whole regions of his thought and feeling blocked off by invisible signs: NO TRESPASSING. He didn’t seek me out in unhappy moments, though I knew he had many. So — grandfatherly advice against joining the gang, such as Feuermann might already have given him? The gentle barrier of Angelo’s humor made that absurd. Stern advice then? When actually I go in fear of his sleepy smile? If he were Martian I might have known what to do. I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them.

I slouched tired in the warm hallway, still seeing the bloated, vulnerable face of Billy Kell’s “adopted mother,” presently hearing Feuermann’s voice behind the closed door of his room. Its meaning reached me slowly. “Any experience is useful. Maybe the Mudhawks are tough — can you get anywhere in this world without toughness? You have to fight back. Can’t afford not to, with your intelligence. People hate intelligence, didn’t you know?”

“Depends on what it does to ’em, doesn’t it?”

“Not so much, Angelo. Dream up a new gadget, they’ll be grateful for a while,” said Feuermann’s voice. “It’ll be only the gadget they love, not the brain that made it — that they fear. They may have enough superstitious dread to worship it — devil-worship — but never will they respect it except superstitiously. I haven’t talked to you this way before because I wasn’t sure you could take it. But I guess you can.” I heard a thing like Feuermann’s kindly, wheezy laugh. “Of course, the superstitious awe of your brains that people will have — that can be used.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Oh, that’ll take care of itself.” I heard an old man’s sigh. “Anyway, remember it’s gadgets they want. Gadgets, simple ideas that seem to explain but leave basic prejudices untouched. They’ll pay a price if the gadget or idea is shiny enough. I know ’em, Angelo.” It just wasn’t Feuermann. Feuermann wouldn’t have spoken disparagingly of gadgets. In his sober way he was as much a gadget-lover as any other American of the ’960s. Hadn’t most of his life been spent in service of a mighty gadget that altered the face of the earth? “No, you have to fight all the way, all the time, with any weapon you can grab. I’m old, son. I know.”

“Oh,” said Angelo lightly, “I can battle my way out of a damp paper bag. But if you don’t go for fighting for the sake of fighting—”

“Then you lose. Sometimes you must even do evil — oh, so that good may come of it, but it’s all tooth and claw, devil take the hindmost.”

So I began to know, Drozma, that Jacob Feuermann was dead.

I knocked and entered. Hardly prepared at all, driven to intervene as some human beings are, when they sense danger to those they love. I recaptured Mr. Miles in time to close the door peacefully and light a cigarette. It was only Mr. Miles whom Angelo saw from his lazy perch on the window seat. I did not care what was seen by that other in the room.

He was in the armchair with his feet on the hassock which Feuermann had worn threadbare. He was even smoking the horse-head meerschaum. That added illogically to my wrath: I may have made one of those human identifications with the inanimate which we are warned to avoid. “Hope I’m not intruding,” I said as I intruded. “Had a hankering for the consolations of philosophy.” I couldn’t have cared less about philosophy. “Throw me out if the spirit moves.” I straddled a chair near the window. He would have had to throw chair and all, and he couldn’t have done it. It was at least some comfort to have no physical fear. “That’s a beautiful meerschaum, by the way. You must be a fancier of horseflesh, is that a fact?”